News & Updates
ClaroRead V5 Case Study - Texas
Posted on: 4/4/2009
Dyslexic twin sisters Yesenia and Yarilee Villareal, 22, live together in Brownsville, Texas. They used ClaroRead while studying to become paramedics at the The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College (UTB/TSC)
Yesenia says: “We started using Claroread in the fall of 2007. We tried a demo, decided it was better than the other programs, and UTB/ TSC ordered it.
I take forever to read, so when Claroread became available, it was so much better. I can scan in the books that I need to read, and the computer reads them back to me. You can also use Claroread to browse the web, as it reads the Internet to you.
It makes it so much easier and it saves so much time. I used to have to get my brother, Jaime, to read to me. I would have to stay up all night and still go to school the next day. It was really tiring.
Claroread is so much better because of the voice. We used other programs but the voices were so boring.
When I was writing in Microsoft Word I would open my work in Claroread while I was typing and it would read my work to me. When I heard a mistake, I knew it wasn’t the word I wanted to use. It was a great help.
If the computer lab was open from 8am in the morning I would be there all day! It is pretty cool. I really like this software.”
Yarilee says: “We listened to the demo and the voice was just so much better.
We had a lot of work to do for our English and composition classes. We could have asked for some help from our tutors, but with Claroread we could type our work ourselves and it would read it back to us. We would hear it and know whether we had used the wrong word.
If you are doing research, you can scan the book in and Claroread will read it to you. It will also read text to you as you are searching the Internet.
The time it took to do things was halved with Claroread – four hours of work was cut down to two hours. We were able to finish our work much quicker.
It has definitely made us more independent. We could write our essays ourselves. We didn’t need to rely on a tutor, and we didn’t need to stay up late reading.
For my graduation, I had to write a short piece to give thanks to people. I even used Claroread to write that. It helped me so much I even got to graduate Magna Cum Laude (the equivalent of first class honours), and all my classes were As and Bs.
In high school, although I really tried, I rarely did as well, mainly because there was no program like Claroread.
Now I work for South Texas Emergency Care, and do four 12-hour shifts a week. It’s going really well. I was 10 when I first thought about becoming a paramedic. I have always really wanted to do it.”
