Posted by Peter Murgio on November 19, 1998 at 11:24:30:
I am a father of a young man who is finishing prep school in June and going onto college. He is a very bright boy but has a learning disability shown mostly when trying to get his thoughts down on paper. Orally he can perform at the A student standard, but when required to commit to paper, he has a problem, and the quality of work suffers dramatically.
I tried purchasing a moderately priced voice activated word processing computer program, but between the fact that it was very slow and required a lot of patience,
( something young men don't have, particularly, ones with Learning Differences) and the rather considerable commitment in time to "train" the program, the effort was not successful. Also, the room background noise greatly affected the application.
I don't know that if we were to invest in a more expensive program if there would be a difference. I have an business associate ( a lawyer) who purchased a program that cost about $800-1000. He has had moderate success mainly due to the fact that the program required a considerable amount of training time ( 40 hours). Thus, he had a mixed recommendation.
I was interested in knowing about any programs that would be more "user friendly" and perhaps more designed for a college student application, stressing ease of use, more normal dictation speed etc.
Please advise