In recent years effective instruction in reading for learners with physical and educational disabilities has received great attention in the schools. However, instruction in the corollary skill of writing has received considerably less emphasis. This review paper notes that through the use of assistive technology, students with a variety of physical and educational disabilities can learn to effectively (a) plan and organize their writing, (b) draft and transcribe their work, and (c) edit and revise their narrative and expository writing.

In this study of concept mapping and expository writing, 12 eighth-grade students with reading difficulties composed descriptive essays under three conditions: no-map support, hand-map support, and computer-map support. Both hand-maps and computer-maps resulted in increases in number of words, number of T-units, and holistic writing scores. Students' attitudes toward writing were most positive in the computer-mapping condition.

Co:Writer works in conjunction with any application you write in (MS Word, Online, Blogs, Email, etc.) As you type, Co:Writer interprets spelling and grammar mistakes and offers word suggestions in real time. New features include a word bank, personal dictionaries and text-to-speech capabilities that work in any application including: MS Word, Google Docs, Open Office, Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Firefox.

Use this product to provide supports for planning and organizing, transcription, and editing and revising. This program provides a library of outlining templates with both procedural and content prompts which can be reviewed with speech output. Drafts can be auto-created from the outline. Transcription legibility, accuracy and word fluency are supported with dynamic word prediction and an expandable library of topical word lists with the option of viewing suggestions by part of speech. Editing is supported with a spell check tool and a homonym checking tool.