ATU783 – Sensory Readable with Mary Wilcox

Hi, this is Mary Wilcox, and I’m the solutions expert at Aventido, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads at beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 783 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on May 29th, 2026.

On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome Mary Wilcox. She’s here to talk all about Sensory Readable and some other tools out there to assist individuals with learning. We also take a little bit of time to celebrate a member of our team, Jim Rinehart. Jim’s been with us for a little over 12 years now. He actually started in the department the exact same day that I did. So I’ve been working with Jim as long as I’ve been in assistive technology.

Today happens to be Jim’s last day. He is running off into the wonderful world of retirement. So in celebration of Jim, we will play an interview from a holiday show quite a few years back, but I think it’s the most recent one that I have with him on the show, so we wanted to make sure that we definitely included it. So Jim will certainly be missed around here, and we wish him all the best as he walks off into retirement. He has helped countless folks here all across the state of Indiana, especially up around the area kind of where he’s based. So Jim, we will definitely miss you, but we hope you have the absolute best retirement that you possibly can.

As always, listeners, we thank you for listening. Let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Jim, can you go ahead and kind of introduce yourselves to the listeners?

Yeah. Hi, everybody. As Josh said, I’m Jim Rinehart. I’m a assistive technology specialist here at Easterseals Crossroads. I’ve been here about 10.5 years. Most of my work is with the vision sensory team. Most of my folks are either visually impaired or are blind. And I live and work out of the northeast part of the state. And most of my work is done in that trapezoid between Fort Wayne and South Bend.

Yeah. Jim is slightly north of what I like to call the snow belt here in Indiana. When it starts getting cold, it seems like it’ll be halfway sunny down here and maybe we get flurries, and somehow the farther you go north in the state, the more of those flurries turn into inches and inches turn into feet. So we’re so happy for all the work that you do up there. Well, Jim, what’s kind of a piece of assistive technology or maybe technology that you’re really looking forward to or you think might make a good gift or a good tool for somebody this year?

Yeah. A lot of people have probably heard a lot about artificial intelligence or AI. And one thing that’s really caught my attention here of late has been the Copilot app that’s part of the Windows operating system. If you’re buying a new computer, it should come loaded on it already. But if it’s not, you can get it through the Microsoft store. And again, it’s free. And it does all kinds of cool stuff. Everything from, if you want a recipe for something, you can ask it for a recipe on how to bake chocolate chip cookies or whatever. I’ve got a person who’s been using it to create children’s stories, yes, of varying kinds.

In fact, I tried something out last night with the Christmas season coming and I said something like, “Tell me a story with … a Christmas story with three kids in it, maybe ages 5 to 10.” And when you hit the enter button to make it work, it takes a few seconds, and then it’ll just spit out a whole Christmas story. It kind of always starts with once upon a time, but it includes the three characters and what … They were all asleep, and they heard a noise, they came down, Santa was at the house, and the whole bit. And his sled was stuck and the kids helped him get his sled unstuck. And it was just a really cool story.

So it does that kind of thing, which is really slick, I think. And also the same procedure basically and ask it to either make you a picture or something that a customer of mine has been working with is making a coloring book page. So you’d ask it to make a coloring book page of something of Santa Claus or something, and it should generate one of those that you can actually download and download it to your downloads folder and then print it off, save it to another folder, or things like that.

And it’s free, so the price is right as well. Just hard to put a bow on it unless you’re getting a new computer as part of it. But yeah, I would encourage everybody to try. And it’s good for just about anybody. I’ve used it with a couple of my people that are screen reader users, and they’ve had pretty good success with it as well.

Nice. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I love artificial intelligence and just all the great things it can do for folks with all different kinds of disabilities. Well, Jim, personally, maybe what’s something you’re looking forward to this holiday season?

Oh, well, yeah, kind of coming up and we’re starting to work on it a little bit. I play trumpet, have since I was 11 years old, and I’ve got a couple of Christmas programs at different churches that I’m playing in. So that’ll be kind of fun. It always is. It’s a lot of work, but when it all kind of comes together and it’s just a lot of fun. And of course, like many people, looking for just a little bit of time off through the holidays, but don’t tell my boss about that.

Your secret is safe with me, Jim, you’re secret safe with me. Hey, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking. And Jim, thank you so much for everything you do for us here every day.

You’re welcome, Josh.

Today, listeners, we welcome Mary Wilcox to the show, and she is here to tell us about Sensory Readable and Sensory Scribe, and I, for one, cannot wait to learn more. Mary, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Before we get into talking about the technology, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yes, sure. I used to be a primary school teacher for many years, nearly 20 years, and I have worked in assistive technology now for 10 years. And I love the fact that I’m still talking to people who are learners or help learners and people in the workplace. I like how I help people still, not with teaching content, but helping them access their learning. So that’s why I really enjoy my job. I talk about all kinds of assistive technology every day.

Awesome. Well, you will be perfect on this and are just completely made for the podcast then. So Mary, we’ve had you come on the show today to talk about a couple of different tools, about Sensory Readable and about Sensory Scribe. So I guess, do you want to start off by telling us maybe about Sensory Readable or maybe even where these tools do come from?

Yes, sure. So both are made by a company called Sensory App House. And people who have worked in assistive technology for some years will probably know the owners because they are the founders of Claro software, made ClaroRead and various apps, and then they sold that company to Texthelp, whatever way now. And they thought, “Well, there’s still some gaps in the assistive technology sector. We want to carry on making technologies.” So they made lots of apps for mainly iOS that are free and also Sensory Readable and Sensory Scribe. So that’s sort of the background behind the people who make these products.

And so Sensory Readable has some similarities to ClaroRead, as in it is text to speech for computers, for any computer, a Mac or a Windows computer. And it helps people with their reading.

Awesome.

So that’s a little bit of an introduction to Sensory Readable.

Perfect. And I was completely unaware of that, but I know Clara was one of the first things when I started doing this quite a while ago, an app that we used with a whole lot of folks for all different kinds of learning needs, for different kinds of work needs, for a lot of different things. So I love that they still saw gaps and were working to be able to find those. So I guess since we’re going to talk about both, let’s start with Sensory Readable. So we know that it can kind of read on a Windows or Mac, but I guess how does it work?

Well, it’s all about simplicity, I’d say, with Sensory Readable. For a start, you just buy the license once. It’s a perpetual license, so that makes it simple. And once it’s installed onto your computer, you can have anything read aloud. And one of the features I particularly like is you can choose for a hover mode. And that means literally any text you hover over, it will read. You don’t need to click listen or draw a box around it or anything. It will read to you and underline the text as it’s being read so you can track the text, which helps with comprehension and relieves the cognitive load because it’s showing where the text is. You don’t have to try and find it yourself.

So that’s basically how it works, but there’s lots of other ways you can customize it to make it most suitable for you. So you don’t have to have it hover over and read, you can choose to select the text or click play in a document. It reads the entire thing. Or you can save the document as an audio file and listen to it like it’s an audiobook. And like other text-to-speech technology, you can slow down the speed of the voice, change the voice. There’s various languages as well.

And you can also change the way that document looks too. So white backgrounds aren’t suitable for many people, especially if you’re dyslexic, got eye strain, you can change the background color, the spacing, the font style so it’s more easy to look at. You’ve got some help also with your own writing. So it will echo back your writing, but also you can use voice typing. So you don’t even have to think about how to spell the words or where those letters are on the keyboard. You can talk, it will type, and then it will read it back to you.

So it’s help not just with the reading side of things, but also the writing and the composition side of things, which means that you can be an independent learner. You’ve not got to rely on somebody to read for you or write it down for you if you find that really difficult. So that’s a general overview of Sensory Readable.

Nice, nice. So it gives you a lot of different tools, not just kind of reading back to you, but also able to change the way everything looks and then actually interact and be able to kind of write the same way. So that’s really great.

Yes. And it’s available on Windows computers and Mac. So you can use either.

They have also made some apps, like I was mentioning earlier, and at the moment they’re free for your iOS and Android phones. So you can use some technology there.

There’s one that they’ve released really recently. I’m trying to think what it’s called, but I’ve never seen anything work so quickly.

Nice.

I’ve seen technology where you can take a photograph of some text and get that text read aloud to you. But this is literally, you click to take the photograph, it immediately will read that text to you. There’s no delay at all. And even handwriting, fairly neat handwriting, but it will do handwriting.

Well, yeah, the fairly neat part’s always kind of got to be in there, but that’s fine. No one can read the messy stuff anyway with or without technology.

No, no, like your doctor’s handwriting or something.

That’s definitely not going to do it. And Mary, you kind of already said this, but I just want to make sure that we kind of drive it home. So this can read anything on my computer. If I’m in a document, if I’m in a PDF, if I’m on the internet, it can read all that information to me?

Yes. And they’ve made it simple so that usually with text-to-speech, to have something read on the internet, you need to install a browser extension, don’t you? But with this, you don’t, especially because it’s mainly because of the hovering mode. So it’s literally wherever your mouse goes, can read that.

Cool, very, very cool. Well, awesome. I love it whenever accessible technology is accessible and easy to use. It really, really kind of helps when it makes it a whole lot easier to be able to do that. So then you also mentioned that they have a tool called Sensory Scribe. How does this one work?

Now, Sensory Scribe is all about reducing the anxiety when it comes to note-taking. Well, I think most people get a bit anxious when they’ve got to write notes, whether it’s a lesson, a lecture, a meeting. They think, well, you can’t really concentrate on what the person is saying as well as make your notes. And then if you’ve got additional difficulties like poor handwriting or you can’t hold a pen or you don’t know how to spell the words or processing difficulties, that’s going to add to the stress. So what Sensory Scribe does, which you can use on a phone or a computer, you open it up, give it a title, click record. It instantly transcribes what the person is saying. And so that’s really great for people who like to see the text as well as hear the person speaking, or if you have difficulty with hearing, you can read it instantly, is live transcriptions, and that transcription is saved.

So what that means is after the lesson lecture meeting, you can revisit any bit of it. So if you struggle with concentration, maybe you have ADHD and you easily lose focus and concentration and you panic that you’ve missed a big chunk of the lecture, you can revisit it. You can re-listen to what was said and also search for a word. So maybe you think, “Oh, they were talking at one point about assistive technology.” You can look for that word within the transcript, and it would jump to that point of the lecture or meeting, and then you can relisten to that or use that content in an assignment maybe if that’s what you need to do.

So it’s, again, a simple bit of technology that records, and you’ve got captions there, and you don’t have to worry about making any notes if you don’t want to. You can sit back and be engaged with the person speaking rather than the worry that you’re not going to remember anything because you’ve not written it down.

Yeah. I’ve worked with folks who have the challenges of forgetting to write things down, like you said, being easily distracted. I’ve also worked with folks who feel like if they don’t write every single word down, they’re going to miss something. And then you kind of miss everything if you’re just trying to focus on just that kind of part. And then who’s going to go back and read five pages of handwritten notes afterwards or type notes out? So I love … and I love that there’s a search feature.

So Mary, just for example, so let’s say, yeah, I said I need to go back to the part on assistive technology. If that said three, four times during it, will it pick up on all those?

Yes. And you scroll through. Like in Microsoft Word, when you search for a word and it’ll show, oh, there’s like seven different places, yes, and you just move through the different times. And you can put little markers in. So if you’re listening, you think, “Oh, that’s an important point. I want to revisit that,” you can put colored markers in as well. And if there were slides, lecture slides or anything like that, you can pair up the slides with what’s being said. So you just click on a button, and that pairs up what’s being said at that point to slide number one or slide number two. So it’s easy to match up a visual thing with what’s being said.

Awesome. Yeah, it gives you those extra tools so that, yeah, you can use the materials that the teacher, the professor, whoever’s kind of doing the training has done and you can match their words and everything with it. That’s absolutely great. I’m sure it’s probably pretty easy to then probably pull that information out, make your own notes if you need two smaller one study guides, however you might want to use that information.

Yes, yes. You can write. There is a box for you to make some notes if you want to, because some users might be comfortable with making notes, but they just don’t want to feel like they’re just focusing on note-taking all the time. So there is a box, and you can download your notes as well or add some of the transcription into your notes as well. So even though it’s simple, it’s very powerful in helping in lots of different ways when it comes to note-taking and learning from lectures and lessons and meetings.

Oh, definitely. No, it sounds like you can kind of use as much or as little as you want or need for that time. You can kind of just hit record and go, but if you want to do a little bit more maybe for different classes or if it’s just the way you learn, you can bring in the extra material as well as take some of your own notes also. So I always like when assistive technology allows for that kind of openness and at least allows folks to learn however they learn, because Lord knows we all don’t do it the same way.

Definitely. We certainly don’t. And thank goodness there’s lots of different types of assistive technology for everyone to choose what works for them. One product doesn’t work for everybody, does it?

No, no, it definitely doesn’t. I always wish there was that magic bullet, but I guess folks like you and I wouldn’t be able to work with the great folks we get to, but it would be nice if there was just one thing that suddenly worked for everybody, but I’ve never seen anything like that in assistive technology or anything else. So I think we’re safe for at least a little while.

I hope so.

Mary, you probably have a ton of these. I know you get to work with folks kind of all around, but can you tell me a story about someone’s experience with one of these great tools and how it was able to assist them?

Yeah, there was someone who they were studying, they were actually at Oxford University, so nothing wrong with their intelligence obviously, but he had ADHD, and he had so much reading to do, of course, and he was really struggling with the focusing on … But he actually wanted it to read even faster than you could speed it up.

Oh, wow.

Which is very funny. To me, very fast reading aloud, it makes me stressed. I can’t relax if it’s really, really, really fast. But then I know that some people, it works really well for them and saves a lot of time. And I think I heard that people who are blind like very, very fast reading aloud. I don’t know if you heard that.

Yeah, I’ve worked with quite a few folks who maybe we implement technology and they get a screen reader or something, and the first thing they do is go in and turn up that voice so fast that I can’t understand what it’s even saying.

Wow.

But they’re just listening for those keywords, the things that they don’t want to hear every darn thing. They’re just listening for the things that they want and they can click and get where they need to be. But I’m just like, “Well, I guess I’m done helping because I don’t understand what it’s saying anymore. It might as well be talking in a foreign language I don’t understand.” So I have definitely known some folks who are blind or severely visually impaired that, yeah, turn up that voice so fast, but it works for some.

Yes, yes. So just not for my brain. I can’t process that quickly. And it’s like that … Have you seen … There’s some research in that if you can see one word at a time and it goes through it increasingly more quickly, a lot of people can learn to read more quickly because they don’t have to track it with their eyes, it’s always in the same place on the screen. It means they can read and process more quickly. It didn’t work for me though.

Yeah, I feel like I would just get anxiety if I even tried to do that because I’d be afraid they’d fasten too fast or I miss one word, then I’d think about it, and then I’m seven words behind. So I’m not sure that would work for me. So was he able to turn it up fast enough to be able to really kind of utilize it in the way he wanted?

He just had to put up with the fastest speed.

Gotcha, gotcha.

Which it was still fast. And he was like, “Well, okay, if it doesn’t go any faster, I’ll have it like that.”

Oh, I love it, I love it. Mary, you’ve been doing this for quite a while, so I always like to ask folks that have been in the business for a bit, what really kind of excites you about assistive technology, the way it’s going, the tools that are out there? What really kind of gets you excited about assistive technology these days?

You know that because I was a teacher, I really love it when children actually realize that the technology is going to make a big difference. Like the saying, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, just like that with assistive technology. If you’re trying to tell a child, “Use this, it’s going to help you,” that is a hard battle. So I think it’s so great when something happens and they think, “No, actually this is going to be so much better.” And then if you see them a few weeks later and it has, and they’re more independent, and they’re just more eager to learn.

When I was a teacher, that was my main aim, I just wanted the children to want to learn because once you’ve got that, you can do it on your own, can’t you? So if assistive technology can help that, I think that’s really great. So that’s what I like when that happens.

Oh, definitely, definitely, yeah. And I love how the teacher and the assistive technology professional both kind of come out there.

Mary, if our listeners want to find out more about the tools available from Sensory App House, the Readable Scribe and the others, what’s a good way for them to do that?

I think it’s probably because … Well, as you probably have guessed, I’m in the UK and the internet is wonderful, so if you wanted some information and me to meet with you and give you trials and things like that, you could email me, mary.wilcox@aventido.com, or you could contact our resellers in the US. We’ve got Boundless Technologies, Westminster Technologies, and AT Discount. So they are our three resellers, and they can provide information and what kind of licenses there are, but also get in touch with me through them as well.

You can also find out more by attending one of my webinars. I do a webinar every month, and I can share a link with where you can find the information and register for the webinars. They’re always free. They usually last about half an hour. And even if you can’t make the live webinar, still register because I can send you a recording as well. So we’ll put the information about accessing the webinars too. Or you can just simply search for Sensory Readable or Sensory Scribe in Google or any other search engine if you don’t like to use Google.

Perfect, perfect, perfect. We’ll put that information, as well as websites for the resellers here in the US, as well as your information down in the show notes so that folks can easily reach out, learn more, find out more, and maybe try out these tools for themselves, see if they’re able to meet the needs that they might have.

Well, Mary, thank you so much for coming on the show, for telling us about these great tools and how they can just help people with a lot of different needs.

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Josh.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule.

Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly.

The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host.

This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.