Advanced

Use a smartphone or tablet to magnify text or images 

Brief description

• Point the phone or tablet at an image or text and use the on-screen magnifier function to increase the size of the text or image for someone with visual difficulties

Text to speech program. Reads text aloud as it is typed so you can listen to what you are typing 

Brief description

• Spelling errors are highlighted and alternative suggestions are given
• Word prediction can be enabled
• Option to hear each word as it's typed or to listen only when a sentence is completed

Who could benefit

People who 

Screen reading software. Take a photo of written text and it will read the text back to you aloud

Brief description

• Available as an app or software

• Choose to hear the text read word by word, line by line or hear the whole text read out

• Speed up/slow down the screen reading voice

Free app co-designed by consultants with aphasia and researchers at City University to encourage people with aphasia to engage in creative writing

Select a piece of writing (your own or one of the 10 included) as your starting point. Automatically erase most of the words to reveal a small set of words to work with. Add and erase words until you have a set of words you'd like to work with. Arrange these words to make a piece of writing and save a photo of it or share it via Twitter or the other apps on your ipad (e.g. email, text, Whats App etc).

Free demo app for Advanced Language Therapy

Try out exercises for Advanced Comprehension Therapy, Advanced Naming Therapy, Advanced Reading Therapy & Advanced Writing Therapy apps (search each app separately for more detailed information)

1 trial is provided for each section of each app to enable you to inform purchase decisions for the apps which can be purchased separately or as a bundle in Advanced Language Therapy

Supplier: Tactus

4 bundle app containing:

Advanced Comprehension Therapy, Advanced Naming Therapy, Advanced Reading Therapy & Advanced Writing Therapy. We recommend searching each app separately for detailed information on each app however below is a brief summary of each:

Advanced Comprehension Therapy:

Written and auditory comprehension exercises, & sentence building exercises

3 modes: Identify (picture matching), Build (sentence building) & Follow (follow directions). Each set of exercises has 12-16 levels

Advanced Naming Therapy:

4 sets of sentence and conversation level exercises: Using verbs to make sentences; Comparing similar items; Category association naming; Generating conversations

Advanced Reading Therapy:

3 levels of paragraph level reading exercises with functional materials (cards, texts, stories)

Advanced Writing Therapy: Matching letters to sounds; Spelling words to dictation; Typing to dictation; Writing sentences & paragraphs

Free trial: yes, free trial available through Advanced Language Therapy Lite app

Supplier: Tactus

Web based suite of exercises designed for cognitive rehabilitation.  Each activity has 2-5 levels of difficulty.

Language activities:

Auditory comprehension (true/fase) tasks, including some very high level activities

Written sequencing tasks where the user is required to put steps for an activity in order (3-16 steps, depending on the level)

Picture-adjective; picture-noun and picture-verb matching activities, including some very high level tasks

Functional, object-location matching tasks

Language based executive functioning activities:

Written decision-making tasks 

Written reasoning of consquences tasks

There are also social cognition tasks including inferring facial expressions & inferring emotional reactions 

Error handling: none

Prompts/cues: none

Record results: yes, and they can be accessed remotely

Free trial: yes, a 10 day trial is available

Comments: Latency is measured for most exercises.  Although a large number of rehab areas are listed, some contain no activities (e.g. expression, naming, fluency, writing). Although reading activities are listed, it is simply matching digits to written numbers. Alot of the exercises rely on very good reading comprehension (e.g. decision making, time estimation, reasoning of consequences, task sequencing). On some activities, the user is unable to amend their response before submitting it (e.g. on task sequencing exercises). 

Suppliers: https://www.neuronup.com/en

Free app which describes the world around you (designed for people with vision impairment)

Point the phone camera at:

- short typed or handwritten text (e.g. a greetings card) & it will speak it aloud

- whole documents & it will speak the text aloud

- barcodes & it will speak out the product name

-  a scene & it will give an auditory description (e.g. busy street with people & cars)

- a person & it will describe them (e.g. a 40 year old, happy blonde woman). If the person has been saved in the user's photos, it will speak out their name.

- currency and it will speak out the amount

Supplier: Tactus

Exercises to encourage inference making from photos of real-life situations (places, events, feelings, situations etc.)

200 pictures are included in 7 exercise formats: what happened? Jobs, places, seasons, feelings, conversations & thoughts.  For each photo, the user is asked to make an inference about the picture (the user can request 3 multiple choice options if they are struggling to make the inference). They are then asked 'How do you know?' (no prompts are given for this part of the exercise).

Could be used to ellicit spoken or written responses

Could be useful when working with people with TBI or as conversation topics

Results are not stored in-app but can be emailed each time an exercise is completed. 

Results are reliant on the user correctly self-rating whether they were correct or not (if they are using the app independently)