memoQ is a translation technology from the company of the same name headquartered in Budapest, boasting an emphasis on quality, innovation and customer satisfaction.
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Read&Write
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Read&Write is a literacy support tool that helps individuals of all abilities read, write, and express themselves with confidence. For education and the workplace, its assistive features include text-to-speech, word prediction, and research tools for users with diverse learning needs.
I believe memoQ is the best CAT tool of all the ones I have tested. As a PM, it has a lot of file filters that are highly customizable. You can even use cascading filters to add extra filter settings to the default file filter. Also, the use of REGEX is almost available everywhere in memoQ. You can use regex for filenames, regex for tagging items in files, regex when importing items, regex when exporting translations, regex for QA checking, regex for filtering, etc. They also added a regex library so you can save your favorite regex and easily reuse them. From a translator's point of view, the LiveDocs functionality is something that no other CAT tool has (to my knowledge). With LiveDocs you can just add any type of document, and if it has selectable text, memoQ will search this text as if it were a TM while translating. Even for non-bilingual documents, this is really helpful as you can sometimes need to reference other materials while translating.
It works very well at home. For exams and homework the text to speech function is really useful. In lessons is good too. The text to speech is more complicated to use because the candidates/ students need a different room. We also need more training on how to use this function.
Setting the speech to text up on different devices that do not have the internet speed to function smoothly or if it is in Exam mode and the user is not constantly using the speech to text mode.
Grouping the voices on their style such as harsh, clipped or soft would enable to pick their preference quicker rather than going through all of the different countries.
I'm just really impressed with the software and the access it gives to learners who are used to coming up against barriers in education. It's a quick-fix for a learner - something they can access usefully and productively with very little training. I also love that learners can access Read&Write on their devices at home - that really is a game changer.
I am giving this an 9. Not a perfect score because working on PDFs is better but not yet as easy as I need for it to be. Working with many students who have executive function challenges, I need a smooth simplistic access method. We are not quite there yet for writing on PDFs. Overall the toolbar on Read&Write is super easy to access and I love that the suite includes several tools on the toolbar providing a solution to many accessibility challenges.
The support team at Texthelp is excellent. They're all super helpful and open to feedback and new ideas. Still, more importantly, they are ultimately fully committed to aligning with us and ensuring they help us provide the best education possible. Furthermore, they're open to new features and always communicate this incredibly well.
It took a solid 2 weeks for R&W to work on our students chromebooks even after reaching out to tech support. The toolbar was greyed out and not accessible to students. Took a long time before tech support helped us solve this problem.
We are using memoQ for only certain projects and it’s not our main tool. It’s relatively slow and sometimes it can get too complicated. It does the job in the end but we prefer Memsource because of its easy-to-use interface as time is very important for us as project managers.
We still utilize Microsoft Immersive Reader as our Tier2 / UDL support tool. However, the word prediction is barely functional and there are confusing limitations to when certain tools are available (the picture dictionary is available in Word Online but not in Edge). We still utilize the Windows-based speech-to-text (windows+h) because it is available natively in Windows even in desktop applications other than a web browser. It is good for people to know one tool that works everywhere. However, Read&Write offers the most complete set of ELA support features all in one place, without burdening the user with extra software or a confusing interface.