Mariah has Central Auditory Processing disorder. This means she can’t hear well in noisy situations, like at school, and what she writes doesn’t always come out as she thinks.

SA’s Specific Learning Difficulties Association helps to educate adults and children like Mariah with learning difficulties.

With almost half of all Australians over 15 years old not having the literacy level needed to cope with everyday life, SPELD recommends text-to-speech programs to help people like Mariah and her 11-year-old dyslexic brother Kyle process information easily.

Their mother Deborah Camp said her children would benefit greatly from increased exposure to technology such as the text-to-speech software which read aloud text.

“Mariah misses a lot of words when she’s reading. She used to get Government funding but she’s improved to the point where she can’t get more funding, although she’s still got a way to go,” Ms Camp said.

Ms Camp said the software would help both her children to cope better with school assignments, reading and writing.

“Mariah will write a passage and read it back to herself as she wanted to write it. This program helps her see what she’s actually written.”

SPELD software advisor Sandy Russo said as learning disabilities were often hereditary, there was a cycle of illiteracy.

“Parents trying to help their kids often lack literacy themselves and need to find help.”

SPELD uses a free technology, BrowseAloud, on its website, which can be downloaded and help users navigate the site by reading content aloud.

“Some of the main benefits of using BrowseAloud over the other free programs, is that it gives the user Australian voices and highlights the text as it is being read so that the user can track the text,” Ms Russo said.

“It also allows the option of dictionary meanings for some of the words, allowing people with low literacy levels to have access to information they may not be able to read.”

Ms Russo said more organisations should make their websites compatible to free programs such as BrowseAloud, to make their content accessible for people who couldn’t afford the standard paid-programs.

The basic web content accessibility guidelines state that a website should be built to a standard which allows people with disabilities to easily access content.