Danish company launches AppWriter app for people with learning disabilities

Europe Mar 26, 2012

LingApps, a Danish software company that develops speech and language technology, launched AppWriter app, the first text editor for the iPad in the USA on March 22.  AppWriter is packed with incredible assistive features, a font designed to help dyslexics read and write, as well as text-to-speech, optical character recognition (OCR), and other features designed to help users who have learning disabilities or visual disabilities.

The app offers users to read all menus and buttons aloud. The Mobile OCRKit feature allows handouts, photocopies or textbooks to be uploaded into the iPad and converted to text that the user can highlight or edit. The app can then read the documents aloud through the text-to-speech feature. Watch the demo video below:

“We are extremely proud to be providing the world’s most natural-sounding Text-to-Speech voices for this ground-breaking assistive tool for the iPad,” explained Lukasz Osowski, CEO of IVONA Software.

For people with learning disabilities, AppWriter contains a word prediction feature enables users to construct sentences and make less grammatical or spelling errors and can be used in combination with the word reader so that the application plays audio of the words as the user types or selects them.

The Dyslexie font features in AppWriter make it easier for people with dyslexia to distinguish the individual letters. This reduces the number of reading errors as well as the effort it takes to read the text. “People with reading disabilities understand the importance of reading, because they don’t take reading for granted. AppWriter helps People with reading disabilities and enables them to participate in today’s information based society”, says Christian Boer, creator of the typeface Dyslexie.

AppWriter comes with American English and American Spanish and currently costs $19.99.

By Aqeel Qureshi