The Wonders of Read and Write GOLD

Cabrini's Disability Resource Center strongly promotes the text-to-speech software Read 

and Write GOLD which the Wiki Site, http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com describes as the 

absolute best text-to-speech option. Students who struggle with reading and writing find 

RWG to be a powerful tool, especially as they move on to demanding college level work. 

Why?  When text is made accessible in electronic version, RWG reads the text aloud at a

pace that is selected by the student.  As this pace setting feature is demonstrated to our 

students, it is amazing for me to see their tangible sense of relief and appreciation for 

a more moderate and deliberate pace.  RWG allows students to select certain sentences, 

paragraphs, or the entire text to read at a given time. Students can highlight important 

points in the text, find definitions, and formulate vocabulary study guides from these 

definitions. The vocabulary guide can also include a text picture dictionary as a different 

method of representation. Struggling writers, who may communicate verbally with 

great ease, can use the RWG voice recognition feature to "talk" their writing assignment 

out, producing a written document to be edited and built upon.  For many DRC students, 

the process of learning how to use UDL friendly software, such as RWG, can be 

overwhelming.  As our students' comfort level with RWG increases, it has been fascinating 

to see how truly revolutionary RWG can be for them with its broad and significant power to 

decrease a variety of learning barriers and increase learning flexibility.



Want to see it in action?  Check out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RypAr9YhcDo&feature=youtu.be.