Pocket Helper

By Sophie Grondona Moving Image Final Year Project 2016/2017

Currently, there are many assistive technologies for individuals with dyslexia available on the market. However, I found that each of these only focused on one feature of the condition. For example, one program would concentrate on providing help with phonological words and another would only help with text-to-speech resulting in a need for an individual to use multiple technologies simultaneously. Furthermore, a lot of technologies that are well known and promoted within Education are computer-based and therefore not always practical for certain situations, e.g. travelling with a laptop.

To overcome these issues, my idea was to design a single application which assists dyslexic students with simple tasks such as reading, worksheets and other documents (physical and digital). It is named ‘Pocket Helper’ as it is a personal assistant, enabling users to read wherever they are, with a phone being the only requirement.

I designed my application to include different features such as a magnifier, background colour changes, highlighting and text-to-speech functionality. These are just sample of features that were highlighted during my research. The features in my application have the potential for expansion to help a wider range of students.

Supervised by Dr John Whelan