Comprehension

The whole point of teaching children to read is so that they can independently understand text, whether it's a story, a menu, or a schedule.  Practice with phonics, fluency, and decoding are done to build a foundation from which comprehending text can be built.

For some students, however, barriers exist that prevent them from reading and understanding printed text.  Examples include low vision and blindness, learning disabilities, and physical disabilities.  For students who are affected by any of these, electronic texts of literature and text books are available to use with popular text-to-speech software on computers and tablets.

Two services that make e-text available to students with the above disabilities are Learning Ally and Bookshare. Both services have freely available software for reading text aloud on a computer.  In order to use the service on an iPad, specific apps are needed.  Learning Ally has developed it's own app (called Learning Ally Audio), while Bookshare works with different apps, most notably Read2Go and Voice Dream Reader.