The Office of Disability & Testing Services maintains software to provide access for students in campus activities and programs. Some applications are available for all students, faculty, and staff and some are only available for licensing directly to students.

Available On and Off Campus

Read&Write

This application is a suite of reading and writing assistance tools. We purchase a campus wide license for this application. Any student, faculty, or staff can install and activate the application with their CSU E-mail login.

ZoomText Fusion

ZT Fusion is a suite of tools which include JAWS screen reader, ZoomTExt video magnifier, and the Fusion tool that is the combination of both. We have a 25-seat license for people on the campus network. Any student, staff or faculty can access a take home license for this software by using their CSU e-mail to register at the Freedom Scientific Licensing Portal.

ReadSpeaker

This is a tool that enables all user of courses in Blackboard Learn to read course content, documents, and exams with text to speech directly from the tools built into out Blackboard installation. It works well for reading exams in lockdown browser sessions.

Dragon Naturally Speaking

This is the most accurate and customizable dictation software available. We have licensing for students to install Dragon on personal computers running Windows. Our licensing is for both Dragon Professional and Dragon Legal. This software is only issued directly to students with approved accommodations through ODS.

Sonocent Glean

Glean is a recording application that ODS licenses for students who used recording lectures as a tool to assist with taking notes. A benefit of Glean is the wide range of platforms that it works within. It also makes it easy to sync the recordings between a student’s devices. Information can be added into the timeline of the lecture recording and the notes from this information can be extracted to study from.

Microsoft OneNote

This application is available for all CSU students. It is licensed as part of a student’s Office 365 account and covered by IS&T. It is mentioned here, because there are recording options useful to our students that work to sync audio recordings to information added to notes pages.

Aira

This is a visual assistance tool to provide visual description of information through a person’s camera on their smartphone by use of an app. We license Aira for students with visual impairments to access the physical facilities on campus. Our entire campus is geo cached. We can also setup student’s personal accounts to share access to additional minutes for access off campus.

Applications Only Available On Campus

ABBYY FineReader

This is a tool used by departments on campus for remediating documents to provide accessible content. It is available in a limited set of computer labs (like the Assistive Technology Learning Center) and the licensing is managed by ODS.

There are other applications licensed and installed on computers by Disability Services for student, faculty, and staff use. Applications like Openbook, Kurzweil 1000, and Duxbury Braille Translator are only available in the Assistive Technology Learning Center.

There are other free or low-cost applications available for students to install and access on their personal devices. The above applications are ones that are licensed by Cleveland State. There are many applications available that can provide access to computers for people with disabilities. If you have any questions please reach out to the Assistant Director for AT and Access at 216-687-2015 or j.dell@csuohio.edu.