Assistive Technology for Writing: Tools for Struggling Writers

Individuals with learning disabilities (LD) and others who find writing challenging often struggle with basic transcription processes, including handwriting or typing, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Problems with transcription affect motivation and interfere with students’ ability to attend to higher order processes such as planning and evaluation. Computer tools, including word processing, spelling and grammar checkers, speech synthesis, word prediction, and speech recognition software, offer support to writers, but they also have limitations. This chapter analyzes the growing body of research on the benefits and limitations of these tools with students with LD and other struggling writers. In addition to research on specific types of assistive technology, the chapter discusses general issues such as the inevitable tradeoff of burdens when adopting new writing tools and the need for instructional methods designed to take advantage of the power of particular writing tools.