Magnifico

This is a portable hand-held dictionary for people who have difficulty decoding or understanding words. It scans a word, shows it on its screen, reads it aloud, and also will read aloud a dictionary definition. Dyslexic people often have trouble using dictionaries, but need to use them a lot. The Reading Pen makes it simple. Here is my review:

A while ago I tried out the Reading Pen I. They now have a new reading pen II which is loads better. I think that the best improvement is that it now reads out the meaning which makes things much easier. It is also really quick and it scans the word very easily, accurately and quickly. I also lent the Pen to my Learning Support teacher - she thought that it was very very useful but she did think the cost might be a problem.
I will list some of the good and bad points - please remember that these are only my views:

Good Points

It reads the word that you scan out loud to you
This new pen now reads out the meaning of the word as well - this is so much better
The pen means that there is no need to look words up in a dictionary which most people find quite difficult
It can spell the word out letter by letter
This new pen can also scan and read out a full line.
Good size for going in my school bag
It comes with head phones so does not disturb the class
It comes in a hard box to protect it
It tells you how much battery life you have left and the batteries seem to last quite a long time.

Bad Points

It is expensive
It cannot read really small (e.g newspaper) or really large fonts and although you can use the Opticard for this but I found it too slow.
It can't read handwriting or off a screen

Overall I think it would be very useful for lots of dyslexic people. In reality I find that I use my iBook all the time and it has a brill dictionary on it that I find easy to use.
In the future I would really like to have a simple scanner like this that would scan, say a paragraph at a time and then read it to me as I followed the text. It would also help if it could read with some expression. This would be so helpful for my English comprehensions and also other subjects when I have to read large amounts of text quite quickly and then write about it. I find that really hard. I am sure there must be lots of people like me.

I got my one of these from Dyslexic.com but they are also sold by many other people. This will take you to Dyslexic.com.

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