Free Assistive Tech Tools Make Learning Accessible to All

Technology provides a terrific way to remove the obstacles to learning. Fortunately, many of the tools available are free but what are they? I reached out to my PLN through Facebook, Twitter, Classroom 2.0 and Google+ to find out. Here are the fabulous resources shared by my PLN.

Assistive Tech Starter Kit
The following accessibility tools are recommended to get started with assistive technology.

Google Apps Accessibility

accessibility features of our products for vision & hearing impaired.

Accessibility on the PCs with MS Office

WordTalk, Balaboka, or Windows Speech Recognition

Accessibility with mobiles

VLingo (Android - free, BlackBerry - cheap)
Dragon (iOS - free) on handhelds or tablets.

FireFox with Accessibility A collection of free accessibility add-ons available from Firefox. FoxVox and CLiCk-Speak are great.

These are all free (or cheap) and provide both effective Text-To-Speech (thus access to content) and those with Word-by-Word highlighting help build sight-word recognition. One of the best uses of text to speech is to support writing with "read back" editing.

Resource courtesy of