Assistive Technology: Design & Development for Children with Learning Disabilities

The preliminary report by Siriraj Hospital claimed that 6-10% of the population who are students in Thailand could be estimated to have learning disabilities (LD). It is therefore necessary for our institute to develop suitable ICT technologies to assist the education of these learning disabilities children. We therefore developed a program called Thai Word Prediction Program. The Thai Word Prediction program aims to assist students with learning disabilities in their writing. The program works with any word processor programs. It predicts the word the students want to enter into the computer. The students type the first letter of a word and the program offers a list of words beginning with that letter. The program will then display words based on frequency of use and most recently used words. In addition, the advantage of Thai Word Prediction program is that it can pronounce vocabulary with a list of vocabulary. After the usability engineering, we conducted the experiment with students with learning disabilities at the School in Bangkok. Therefore the results indicated that the students with learning disabilities in this study improved their ability of writing by 50%, 81.89% and 100% respectively.