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Free software designed for people living with aphasia.

Practice spelling/ typing

Access via mouse or touch screen

Range of categories: social media, text messaging, online shopping, frequently used words

Personalise with own word categories

Collate results across tasks

Choose level of support / difficulty

Speechify is a text to speech tool. It can be used to read aloud any typed text: messages, social media, e-books, PDF's, or photograph text to read pages from books, magazines and other text

Highlight text as you read

Choose speech rate

Choose voice

Syncs across devices

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

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

6 levels of reading, listening and topic vocabulary exercises for those with moderate to mild reading difficulties who are keen to practise independently

Within each level, there are 10 everyday topics (e.g. making a journey, reading a paper, reading an email, how to lose weight), each with 6 different exercise sets

Web based program - exercises can be allocated remotely & results can be accessed by the SLT remotely

The clinician purchases a yearly license and patients have free access to the software on a computer or via an app on a tablet or phone device

The software is designed for learners of English as a foreign language but can be useful for people with aphasia

Type of exercises & brief description:

Photos of nouns are presented for confrontation, verbal naming.  There are 20 items in each exercise set and a total of 10 exercise sets which must be purchased individually

Speech recognition software is used to assess whether the spoken attempt was correct

Prompts/cues:

If the first attempt isn’t recognised, an initial, written letter is provided. If the second attempt isn’t recognised, the word is spoken and written and the user moves to the next item automatically

Record results:

Results are shown at the end of the session. In order to receive results, the professional license must be purchased

Comments:

•  It is difficult to identify what some of the photographs are of
• The items are always presented in the same order
• Not all regional accents or dysarthric speech are recognised.