Software and equipment

The Northampton Assessment Centre (NAC) offers training on a variety of software and equipment recommended for students in their Needs Assessment Report (NAR) and funded through the Disabled Students Allowance (DSA). An overview of these are provided on this page.

Text-to-speech software

This type of program can help support disabled students with their reading and proofreading. They often include a variety of features including playback so that you can listen to your (or other people's) text being read to you; customising your preferences (e.g. larger icons, use of colours, voices etc); spell and homophone checker as well as one-click scanning.

We currently provide training for Texthelp Read & Write Gold and ClaroRead

Preview a YouTube video clip on text-to-speech software:

Speech recognition software

This does what it says - it recognises speech! You wear a headset with a microphone, and once your voice has been set up, virtually anything you say will be recognised by the software and typed into an electronic document.

We currently provide training for Dragon Naturally Speaking.

OCR scanning software

Optical character recognition (OCR) software enables the conversion of printed documents into an electronic format, once they have been scanned, they can then be edited using a common word processing application such as Microsoft Word or read aloud by text-to-speech software. It can also duplicate images and most retain page layout.

We currently provide training for OmniPage.

Mind-mapping software

Mind mapping can help you to get your ideas down as quickly as possible using a combination of words, shapes, pictures etc. Mind maps can usually be transferred into other document formats such as Word and PowerPoint.

We currently provide training for Inspiration and Mind Manager.

Preview a YouTube video clip on mind mapping:

Digital voice recorder (DVR)

About the size of a mobile phone a digital voice recorder can be used to record events such as lectures and assignment/dissertation interviews. If appropriate it can also be used with speech recognition software.

We currently provide training on Olympus products.

Other

There is a variety of other software which can support your studying such as virtual typing tutorials; for example we also provide training on KAZ. All university computers have Mind Genius, a mind mapping program (which contains an easy to use tutorial).