FYI - for the home and school computers...

Voice Recognition Software Helping Dyslexics

By IAN AUSTEN



ANDREW GANAT graduated from high school in May and is looking
forward to college in the fall. While that is an important
milestone in anyone's life, reaching it is especially sweet for Mr.
Ganat, 18. In the second grade, he was found to have the learning
disability dyslexia.

 "My overall problem is memorizing the spelling of words," said Mr.
Ganat, who is from Norwalk, Conn. "I can get all the letters down
but I can't make them into the word."

 Specialized schooling including five years as a boarder at
the Gow School near Buffalo, which specializes in teaching students
with language-based learning problems — certainly helped take
Mr. Ganat to the threshold of college. But for the last three years
he has found another way to boost both his grades and his outlook.
Mr. Ganat is one of a number of dyslexics, both students and
adults, using voice recognition software to transfer their ideas
into print.

 "It's made my grades improve," Mr. Ganat said of the software. "I
didn't think I was getting the right grades before. I'm not a dumb
kid, so it was frustrating. But now I've kind of found a way to be
even with everyone else."

 Marshall H. Raskind, a learning disabilities researcher at the
Frostig Center in Pasadena, Calif., said that voice recognition
software could make a significant difference for many people with
dyslexia. "It is a great equalizer," he said. "When someone feels
they can express themselves in writing it can have positive
implications for self- esteem. One guy told me, `For the first time
in my life I can write love letters.' "

 After studying the use of the software by dyslexic students for 10
years and publishing four joint papers on his findings, Dr. Raskind
has concluded that speech recognition not only allows dyslexics to
communicate more efficiently but may even help them overcome their
condition.

 "Children who wrote using speech recognition technology for as
little as 10 1/2 hours showed significant improvement in
reading, decoding, spelling and comprehension," Dr. Raskind said.
"We were blown away by this. The results are preliminary. But it is
very encouraging."

 The use of voice recognition software by dyslexic students has
largely taken software companies by surprise. "The focus is around
driving larger business opportunities for voice recognition," said
David Nahamoo, senior manager for human language technologies at
I.B.M. (news/quote) Research. "But the last time I saw the letters
from dyslexic users, I thought, it's wonderful."

 While software companies have focused on developing voice
recognition for common uses like controlling cell phones, making
computers more accessible to nontypists and hands- free control of
gadgets in automobiles, the technology is slowly making its way
into a range of applications for people with disabilities.

 Harnessed by determined researchers in what is almost an
underground movement, it has helped people with impairments ranging
from paralysis to repetitive stress injury that make typing painful
or impossible. People with dyslexia are now beneficiaries, too.

 Dyslexia is a broad term for language disabilities that cause a
person to have trouble understanding written words, sentences or
paragraphs. The International Dyslexia Association estimates that
dyslexia is the most common source of reading, writing and spelling
problems. Dyslexic students tend to have separate vocabularies for
writing and speaking: even if they are highly articulate, they draw
on a strictly limited selection of words when writing. When they
were able to dictate their papers and examination responses to a
computer, Dr. Raskind found, the students exploited their full
language capabilities.

 So far, the use of voice recognition by dyslexics is very limited.
Dr. Raskind said he had been unprepared for the opposition he
encountered from some people, including teachers.

 "I don't want to make it sound like a panacea," he said of the
software. "It can be very, very frustrating for some students. But
many people view assistive technologies in general as a crutch, a
way of avoiding a problem. It's weird: it's like seeing someone
with a white cane and saying, `Rip that cane out of their hands and
let them do it themselves."

 Susan Barton, a former Macintosh software developer who now acts
as a consultant on dyslexia and runs a Web site
(www.bartonreading.com) about a tutoring program she has developed
for dyslexics, said that teachers frequently won't let them use the
software. "The biggest problem is to get teachers to accept this,"
she said. "Many teachers think that fair is having everyone do
everything exactly the same way. That's a distorted sense of
fairness and a misunderstanding of dyslexia."

 Robert Follansbee, co-director of Speaking to Write, a project
financed by the Department of Education that is examining the use
of voice recognition in secondary schools, said: "Special educators
are hip to it now. They get it. But often regular educators don't
understand it. The comment I've heard many times from teachers is
`They'll never learn to write.' "

 Dr. Raskind first got the idea of having dyslexics rely on
computers when he headed the learning disabilities program at
California State University at Northridge. In 1991 he began
developing a long-term research program with Eleanor L. Higgins, a
senior research associate at the Frostig Center, a research and
treatment center for people with learning disabilities. Together
they focused on dyslexic California State students who were
dictating reports and exam answers by using Dragon Dictate, a
precursor to the popular L&H Dragon NaturallySpeaking
software.

 "Often they'll be able to talk it out fine but they have
difficulty translating it to the printed page," Dr. Raskind said.

 Dragon Dictate's performance with what was then state-of-the-art
computers was, Dr. Raskind recalls, not brilliant in technical
terms. But the results generated by the 29 Northridge students who
used it were impressive. "You could no longer differentiate their
writing when they used speech recognition from writing by students
without learning difficulties," he said. "The quality of their
writing was far superior" to what it had been.

 So were the students' marks. One factor was what might be called
the 25-cent word effect. "If you use bigger words, a bigger
vocabulary, you get graded higher," Dr. Raskind said.

 It was some of Dr. Raskind's own subjects who first suggested that
the software might even be having an effect on their reading or
writing skills. "After using it over the course of a year, they
started saying things like, `You know, I think my reading and
spelling are getting better,' " he said. Two joint studies he
has done since then tracking students ages 9 to 18 seem to confirm
their impressions.

 Dr. Raskind believes that the explanation may be fairly
straightforward. "You say a word and then you see a word," he said
of the programs. "That's an age-old approach that's used with kids
who have dyslexia."

 Mr. Ganat, the college-bound 18- year-old, began working on voice
recognition in the 10th grade. Although he struggled at first, his
main problem now, as he tells it, is dealing with others'
disbelief. Using the I.B.M. speech recognition software ViaVoice,
he writes the first draft of most of his papers and even the
answers to some examinations. Then he pastes his work into
Microsoft (news/quote) Word for revisions and corrections.

 This year he wrote a 15-page history paper on the construction of
the Pentagon. "My history teacher didn't believe I wrote it at
first because it had no spelling mistakes," said Mr. Ganat, who
plans to attend Johnson & Wales University in Providence,
R.I. "Now I feel like I'm ready to write at a college level."

 Since switching to the software, Mr Ganat said, his reading has
improved "but my spelling is not up to par."

 Certainly Mr. Ganat's mother, Elaine, has noticed a striking
improvement in the e-mail he has sent home. "Before you had to
figure out where the vowels went," she said. "Now you can read
them."

 Brett Jeremy didn't have the advantage of voice recognition in
dealing with his dyslexia in school. He got through college by
painstakingly writing and rewriting papers in longhand and then
turning them over to a girlfriend "who could word process at 80
words per minute." After becoming vice president for production at
Native Kjalii Foods, a maker of salsa and tortilla chips in San
Francisco, it took "days of frustration and pressure" to produce a
five-page technical document because he constantly transposed
letters within words.

 About four years ago Mr. Jeremy tried an early version of Dragon.
"I thought it was the stupidest thing in the world," he said. "It
took forever and I didn't understand it." But he gave a subsequent
version of the software a chance a year later and became a
believer. "Now I can push out a very technical five-page document
in less than a day," he said.

 That's not to say the program is perfect. "Try dictating a word
like `dewatering granulator,' " he said. "The software just
doesn't even try."

 Paradoxically, some of the technological advances being made as
I.B.M. and L&H chase a wider market may work against the
interests of dyslexics. Early voice recognition programs demanded
that users utter each word slowly and deliberately. The results,
after a bit of delay, appeared on computer screens one word at a
time. Current software, however, demands that users speak at a
normal, conversational pace, with the words quickly flooding the
screen.

 "It depends on the student, but for some it can be too much
information, too fast," Dr. Raskind said. He is one of many
researchers who think that the answer may be a return to the past
and are studying the features of voice recognition software to find
which are most effective for dyslexic users.

 The goal is to develop a stripped- down version of the software
that won't overwhelm the user — a feeling that even the fully
literate consumer knows only too well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circuits/19READ.html?ex=9965350
03&ei=1&en=3b61ac0cd6419215

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