Read&Write Review
April 18, 2024
Read&Write Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Read&Write
Since I work at a district school board, Read&Write is primarily used as a Tier 1 education support as well as a Tier 3 support for individuals with learning disabilities that have difficulty reading and writing in the traditional sense. Since we have a district-wide license, all students and staff have access to both Read&Write and OrbitNote which has greatly helped to reduce the stigma of assistive technology usage that is often a barrier for those who rely upon AT to be successful at school.
- Read&Write works well with Word in Office 365 (we are a Microsoft board)
- Read&Write is excellent in the speech to text and text to speech areas.
- We love the prediction tool, especially for users whop are apprehensive to dictate yet still require spelling support.
- We love the collect highlights feature, especially when we are researching a webpage in order to write a research paper.
- We love the summarize tool!
- One main thing that I think could be improved is reducing the lag time when using text-to-speech tools. Even when our laptops are up-to-date and firmware is also up-to-date, I find that there is a significant lag time between selecting text to be read using text-to-speech and the tool actually "speaking". In some cases it has been 15 more more seconds, and this has "lost" some students that I have worked with. This is similar with the lag time experienced between dictating and words actually showing up on the screen when using the Talk&Type feature. Again, I feel that these tools are great and we are happy to have them, but I have found that the lag time is often a barrier to usage for some of our students and even staff.
- It would be so lovely if voice notes were available for Microsoft users with the R&W Chrome extension.
- I also think that it would be great if highlights could be collected across several websites, etc. into the same "collect highlights" document.
- Our adoption of Read&Write & OrbitNote has helped our entire district at least enter assistive technology into a common conversation when we are discussing UDL and Tier 1-3 supports for our students with learning disabilities.
- I feel that Read&Write's usability has helped to ease some teachers' fears around technology- indirectly supporting students that they are teaching.
- I feel that our board-wide license is the best implementation factor! All of our staff and students have access to R&W which helps to remove the stigma around assistive technology usage with students with learning disabilities. If their peers are also using technology and even some of the Read&Write tools to complete their school work, our learners who require those assistive tech supports are much more apt to employ those tools!
I think that being able to have our staff and student access assistive technology tools that they need to be successful anywhere they are online is ultimate accessibility. I have really seen Read&Write's universal accessibility grow since we adopted Read&Write in 2020. Our students are now able to use the R&W website toolbar to access their LMS, which was previously inaccessible and was a big barrier.
Do you think Read&Write delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Read&Write's feature set?
Yes
Did Read&Write live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Read&Write go as expected?
No
Would you buy Read&Write again?
Yes