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Designed in Australia, ReadOn is a comprehensive learning tool designed to assist people of all ages to overcome the reading problems associated with dyslexia.

For a 5 min flash video tour of ReadOn click here. Note that a flash player needs to be installed on your PC. See the link below to download* a free player.

Unlike software packages that are purely assistive in nature, ReadOn incorporates specific learning strategies to help people overcome reading problems.

The product helps children and adults with reading difficulties including dyslexia to become independent learners, allowing them to enjoy ownership of the learning process.

Reading is a complex process and when it is not mastered students will struggle to become independent readers. Regardless of reading level, ReadOn allows the student to experience reading with minimal supervision and support. Mistakes can be made and risks taken, resulting in the subject having an increased willingness to read, with improving reading ability leading to higher personal self esteem.

ReadOn incorporates specific learning strategies to help people overcome reading problems. In other words ReadOn helps the user learn to read, as well as being an assistive tool.

Features include:

• Visual tracking exercises
The visual tracking exercises of spelling the word and reading, and sweeping the word and reading are detailed in ‘Three Steps to Easier Reading’ by Ron Davis, included in this package.
As well as being useful for people with dyslexia, these exercises can also assist people who constantly misread words, because they have not taken in the whole word. If this habit is not addressed, plurals and tenses in particular tend to be confused, making comprehension inaccurate. Most teachers will be aware of children in their classes who perform poorly in comprehension activities, even though they appear to be able to read. These students will also benefit from the visual tracking exercises included in ReadOn.

• Comprehension support
People with reading difficulties use up much of their mental energy struggling to decode text. As a result there is little energy left to comprehend what is read, which is, after all, why we read in the first place. Without comprehension, students are likely to be discouraged from reading as there is little satisfaction, but instead frustration. ReadOn’s auditory feedback relieves the student of this constant decoding struggle, allowing comprehension to take place, and with it the motivation to continue reading.
ReadOn can be customized to read words, phrases or paragraphs out loud.
Ron Davis’ ‘Three Steps to Easier Reading’, included with this package, details the ‘Picture at Punctuation’ strategy. The goal of this strategy is full and complete comprehension. This strategy can be performed on ReadOn, by using the up and down arrows on the keyboard, to go through the text, phrase at a time.

• Auditory feedback
Where a student has difficulty interpreting or decoding a word, ReadOn can simply read the word out loud using the ‘Word Assist’ function. This is the default action for assistance with difficult words, however, ReadOn also allows you to set the Word Assist style to perform more advanced functions, to either perform a letter by letter sweep of the word, or to spell the word prior to reading the word out loud. The frequency of the sweep or spell can also be set. ReadOn allows you to select from a number of voices for auditory feedback. If necessary, voice pitch, speed and volume can all be adjusted.

• Customised visual cues for problem words
People with dyslexia are often visual thinkers. Despite hours of drilling high frequency words, many words remain difficult to decode and comprehend, due to the lack of visual meaning. ReadOn allows a parent, teacher or the student to enter picture cues for such words.
Discreet markers indicate where a visual image has been entered for a word, allowing the user to access the image. This will aid in decoding and comprehension. Clay models, drawings or pictures created by the student can be used, ensuring the image has relevance to the user.
• Create, load, edit and save stories and articles in electronic format
ReadOn allows parents, teachers and helpers to upload, enter and customize texts for students to read. Texts can be typed directly into ReadOn, or texts can be copied from other files, or from the internet. Once the text is loaded into ReadOn, instructors can customize the material to suit the needs of the individual student. Instructors can substitute words or phrases and add/remove text where appropriate. Once the text is customized, it can be saved for later use. Texts saved under one student’s name, can also be easily accessed by other users. So in the classroom setting, teachers can quickly accumulate a variety of texts for a variety of students.
To get you started, ReadOn provides you with four sample classic fiction stories.
ReadOn also comes with an inbuilt spell checker. This ensures that typographical errors are not inadvertently included in the student’s text.
• Load text from books and magazines using optical character recognition (OCR)
Older students with reading difficulties are often frustrated at not being able to read age appropriate material. ReadOn’s scanning facility allows students to scan texts of interest. With ReadOn’s auditory support and customized visual cues, students can read and comprehend these texts independently. This is an invaluable option for reading and understanding subject specific text.
• Multi-user support
  ReadOn`s configurable, multi-user support makes it an ideal addition to the computer lab or classroom. ReadOn can be customised to suit each student`s needs, and those settings saved for later use.

• Personalised settings to meet individual needs
ReadOn can also be used as a diagnostic tool. When the student requests auditory feedback, these words are automatically saved in an individualized word bank. Teachers, parents, tutors and other specialists may choose to include these words in the student’s language program. The words can be displayed with or without frequency. Words frequently appearing in the word bank, may require multi-sensory work in order to be mastered.
The contents of the word bank can be printed, or copied to another application, and used as a basis for multi-sensory exercises, flash cards or word charts.
Students often get a thrill from checking the word bank after a reading session, to see if they can decode the words. This kind of use encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning.
• Easily networked

For a printer-friendly expansion of these features as a ^PDF download, click here.

Who can benefit from ReadOn?

Used as the basis of a home or school reading program, ReadOn can benefit:

• Classroom teachers who would like to strengthen the reading skills of all young learners (including dyslexic students).
• Parents who want an interactive learning tool to improve and monitor their child’s reading skills.
• Anyone (adult or child) who wants a dyslexic-friendly software program for improving reading and comprehension.

For the Teacher a 'Check List' of common reading difficulties encountered in students can be downloaded as a ^PDF file by clicking here.

How does it work?

ReadOn helps develop student learning strategies and reading skills over time. As a prerequisite for the process the student must have mastered the upper and lower case symbols of the alphabet.

• The first step of the process involves the parent, tutor or older student sourcing appropriate reading material and entering the text into ReadOn. Texts can be typed directly into the software, or copied from other files or the internet. If the material is in hard copy form like a book or magazine, ReadOn’s Optical Character Recognition function can be used.
• Once the text has been entered the student can use ReadOn’s visual tracking options to read it. ReadOn uses word, phrase and paragraph highlighting to remove any distraction from the surrounding text while reading. Students can easily focus on the current word, phrase or paragraph, rather than being distracted by all the other text on the page. When moving through the text, highlighting can be set to either the full word, phrase or paragraph, or can include a sweeping of the word where each letter is highlighted one at a time. ReadOn also offers a spell reading option, where each letter of a word is named and highlighted, before the whole word is read.
• Students can then use ReadOn to read texts independently from parents, teachers or tutors. Instead of asking a third party for assistance on tricky words, ReadOn’s auditory word assistance can be utilised. When comprehension is lost, ReadOn can also read words, phrases and whole paragraphs back to the student.
• The words for which the student sought assistance are automatically recorded in an individual word bank. This information can be printed or extracted and used as a basis for further work, which might include multi-sensory activities, visual imagery, clay models or word lists.
• Words appearing frequently in the word bank may indicate that the student is triggering on those words and would benefit from the symbol mastery procedure. They could, for example, create a painting or a clay model that represents the word. This visual clue can then be added to ReadOn and be used to assist with the student's decoding in the future.

As the student continues to work through this cycle, self-confidence and reading ability should continue to improve. As time goes on, the student should require less and less external assistance. This process is uniquely described by the ReadOn developers as 'The Learning Vortex' and a summary scheme of this vortex can be downloaded as a ^PDF by clicking here.

ReadOn allows the student to learn at his or her own pace and progress can be continually monitored with the support of the individual word bank.

Windows Minimum System Requirements:

• PC with 300MHz or faster processor
• We recommend sound card & external speakers for best quality
• TWAIN compliant scanner, keyboard and mouse
• 64MB available RAM or higher is recommended
• Windows 98, NT, 2000, Me, XP Home, XP Professional (inc SP2)
• 300MB of free hard disc space
• CD or DVD drive
• Screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels with high (16bit) colour