High Tech Help With Reading Disabilities

There are millions of people in this country with dyslexia or other reading challenges who struggle to comprehend the written word. A company called Arkenstone has teamed up with IBM to develop software that can help. IBM researcher Bruce Mahaffey says it is a two-fold solution....that uses text to speech technology to read documents aloud...

"The second way is we add graphic enhancements. Such as, we can enlarge text. Or we can increase the amount of white space around a word.

The software is called WYNN, W Y N N, which stands for What You Need Now. It has been tested at the University of California at Berkeley in the disabled students program...

"And it's as simple as students can't read and now they can. Or they can process the information. So, we have law students there, humanities students who will scan their text and use it to read aloud. And so they'll get through text that otherwise they might have had to have had a personal reader."

The Wynn software sells for under four hundred dollars and runs on Windows 95, 98 or NT. You can get more information through Arkanstone at 800-444-4443, or on the web at ibm.com.