MDA Avaz Reader for Dyslexia is available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. MDA Avaz Reader app uses your device’s camera (via Optical Character Recognition or OCR technology) to capture printed materials including book pages, newspapers, magazines, and more to assist children with dyslexia and other reading disabilities in being more successful in reading. It does this by providing text-to-voice capabilities where the page is read to them or by blocking out distractions by focusing on a smaller portion of the page at once using different views.

When first installing the app, you will be taken to the home page named, “Your Library”. There are two pages pre-loaded into your library, a “Get Started” page and a “Demo Story”. To get started adding your own pages, follow these simple directions: Click on the “add a page” option on the top left Choose “camera” Scan the page using your device’s camera When you are happy with the image, choose “use image” Click on “review” so that you can look at the print to make sure it has read it all correctly On the “review annotation” page you will be able to add punctuation or correct misread letters. After reviewing, click “done” and the page is ready for your child to read or have it read to them. Once you have added the page, your child can choose to read the page or have it read to them as a picture (which looks like the original book page) or as plain text (which eliminates pictures from the page making it a clean, distraction-free reading space.

There are three different views to choose from that can be used either when your child is reading it or having it read to them in both the picture format and plain text format. These include: word view, sentence view, and page view. A pencil button on the screen can be used as a pointer by your child when reading word-by-word, after reading a word it is marked with a red underline to prevent rereading the same word. This app has several great options for personalization depending on your child’s needs. For example, you can slow down the voice and change dialects of the narration voice with United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Ireland, and Australia to choose from. You also have the option of increasing and decreasing the font size using a sliding button, as well as to increase the spacing between lines of print on the page. These settings could be helpful if your child wants to read a book that uses small font with poor spacing on the pages. In addition to these settings, you can even change the background color of the page (there are several pastel colors to choose from in the settings menu) which could be helpful for children with vision impairments. There are also several “hint” settings to choose from dependent upon your child’s reading needs. These “hints” can aid in your child sounding out the words as well aiding comprehension by giving a visual example of the word’s meaning (dependent upon the settings you choose).

Overall MDA Avaz Reader is a great app in our reviewer’s opinion, however there are a few features that could make the app frustrating for some users. One of these is that although the app store description says, “Several pages can be added at the same time,'' our reviewer did not find this to be true. After exploring every setting and adding pages, she was unable to add more than one page at a time. This could be very confusing for the students (even for just a short picture book) because would have to read the page, then choose the correct page that goes next and so on, possibly getting them out of order and missing the true meaning of the story. The OCR technology also misreads some fonts and sometimes does not detect punctuation, so you have to add the correct marks during “review” process after scanning the page. If you do not add the punctuation, the auto read function will read the whole page as one big sentence.

This app could definitely prove useful for reluctant readers due to the many personalization settings available, especially the ability to only focus on one sentence or even one word at a time. Students with dyslexia or other reading disabilities, as well as those with vision impairments could benefit from the use of this app.