Computers are your child's best friend. The sooner your child learns to use a word processing program, the better off he will be. The word processing program will eliminate a good deal of the frustration that makes writing difficult for individuals with dyslexia. It will eliminate the mechanical barriers your child faces — poor penmanship, bad spelling — enabling him to showcase his ideas through his writing.

Although your child may encounter resistance to producing typewritten assignments in elementary years, by the time he reaches high school his teachers will expect all significant written work to be typed; at the college level, he is likely to bypass the printer altogether and frequently submit work via disk, CD, or e-mail.

Word Processing Programs

There are many software programs available to help a young child learn keyboarding skills. While typing is generally a slow process for very young children, it may still be more efficient for your child with dyslexia to use a hunt-and-peck approach than to rely on handwriting, especially if he has difficulty writing legibly. Generally, typing speed will improve when the child is about age 10 to 12.

Most children want to be able to use computers to access the Internet and play computer games, so your child is likely to be quite willing to work at improving typing skills.

There is also a product called the AlphaSmart Keyboard specifically developed for students with learning disabilities; it allows students to enter and edit text, and the text can later be transmitted to a computer for adjusting layout and printing. The product is popular in many schools; it is a good choice for younger children and in classroom settings.

By the time your child is about age 10, he should be introduced to a regular computer word processing program. In addition to learning to input text, your child should learn how to use specific features of the program, including use of the spell checker and grammar checker, and use of features like “autocorrect” and automatic text completion options that can simplify text entry and help avoid common spelling and typographical errors.

Using a word processing program also enables your child to work with his teacher to improve the quality of his writing through revisions and redrafts. Because the student is spared the laborious process of writing out a second draft by hand, the teacher is free to offer detailed comments and suggestions. Your child will become more confident about writing when he realizes that his first draft does not have to be perfect.

Another advantage to using the computer is that the child can set display options to make it easier to read material — for example, by choosing to view a magnified version of the text — and can also choose a preferred font. Many children with dyslexia are easily confused by different font sets, and so often develop a strong preference for those which seem to be more readable. The Comic Sans font, which comes with Windows systems, is a popular choice partly because it more closely resembles penmanship generally taught in school.

Special Software for Dyslexia

You may also be interested in specialized software designed to help individuals with dyslexia. The TextHelp company makes software products called Read & Write and Wordsmith that have enhanced features including a phonetic spell checker, homophone support, word prediction, dictionary, pronunciation tutor, and text-to-speech features. These features are more helpful to many children than a standard spell checker, as it will help them to more accurately identify words. Text-to-speech features allow the computer to be set to read aloud words as they are typed in or to read aloud any text in compatible file formats.

The text-to-speech function is also available through many other inexpensive software formats, including many that are offered for free. A program that also enables speech for Web site content can be very helpful, especially if your child is a slow reader, when he needs to do Internet research to prepare school papers and projects.

For an older child (about age 12 and older), you may consider getting speech-recognition or dictation software; this will allow your child to use a microphone to dictate into the computer. A popular package is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The drawback with dictation programs is that the software must be trained to recognize the voice and speech patterns of the user; generally this is done by reading specific passages into the computer. The passages may be difficult for a younger child to read; even an older child may have some difficulty, but the older child is likely to have more patience for the process.

Also, although dictating seems like an easy way to get words into print, the user must be able to read well enough to catch and correct some of the more egregious mistakes this software is likely to produce. Although accuracy of the software improves with each new version, it still transcribes many words erroneously, especially proper names.

Hand-Held Devices

Your child may also benefit from hand-held dictionaries or spell checkers. A simple and inexpensive product (approximately $25) is the Franklin Spelling Ace, which enables the student to type in a phonetic or guessed spelling in order to find the correct spelling. A child with reading difficulties might prefer a slightly more expensive option with speech capabilities, the Franklin Speaking Homework Wiz (about $50).

As your child encounters more difficult reading tasks, you might consider the WizCom Reading Pen, which is a handheld device with a small electronic scanner that can scan a word or line of text and read it aloud to the student; it also has a built in dictionary with definitions of all words. Accuracy is poor for scans of full lines of text, so the tool is not helpful for a child with no reading skills.

However, for individual words accuracy is quite high, and the product's built-in dictionary contains many technical terms that a high school student is likely to encounter in textbook reading. Thus, the Reading Pen can be extremely useful to a student who has difficulty deciphering new and unfamiliar words.