Familiar with SnapType app for iPad and iPhone? If you have students with dysgraphia, you might want to take note of this easy to use, worksheet filling/ annotation app. One of the many annotation apps available, SnapType app is free and created by an OT student. Recent upgrade gives it a brand new look and new features of sharing, printing and folder system tools.
What’s new?
Quite a bit. The initial SnapType app provided basic tools to take a picture , create text boxes and type. Work flow for production or printing included taking a screen shot and sending it from your photo album.
Complete worksheets using annotation tools:
New tools and options available for importing images of a worksheet: 
Ability to organize files into folders:
SnapType Pro (2.99) is an in app purchase. Pro provides a Whiteboard feature to filter the paper color to appear more like a sheet of paper. The Pro version allows storing more than 3 documents.
Another tool for your OT mTool Kit!
Carol
OT's with Apps & Technology 
Hello Carol, I was pleased to see this app was improved – I work with students age 11-22 and the original app did not allow the font size to shrink adequately for the worksheets my students were doing. I was hoping to find a way to open a completed worksheet into a word processing app like Notes, Notability, etc in order to use the text to speech option but couldn’t figure out a way to do this. Any ideas? Thanks, Lynn, OTR/L
Hi Lynn,
From my experience and additional trials, I have not found a way to get speech options to work. Apps like SnapType, rely on use of images (pictures taken) then put text boxes on top of the pictures. When they are flattened or printed it is literally a picture with text on it. I tried using some scanning apps that had TTS capabilities to see if they would process both the Snaptype image and the text. Although I was not exhaustive with what I trialed – it would not work. Most apps that have some TTS capabilities are PDF files that actually do have text on them. Typing on them adds more text. Since the Snaptype uses images not text based PDF’s it has no text to read.
What I might suggest if you need TTS for the whole document, consider ClaroPDF, a bargain at 2.99. It will read the whole text and the annotated text also. It will require a different work flow than taking a picture however. If you search OT’s with Apps Blog you will find an article about ClaroPDF and the directions for how to use it. It works great with Google Dr. Documents and PDF files saved and imported, but requires set up time of documents . If you want the annotated text to speak, you might consider using Speak selection accessibility in iOS or an app like Keeble.
Hope that helps. If I figure any thing more I will let you know.
Thank you for visiting and sharing your question.
Carol
Lynn,
I apologize for the delay. The only app that I know will read back – use text to speech is ClaroPDF. When using annotation apps, you are taking a picture of the worksheet and then adding text to the text boxes. That is why the worksheet will not read – it is not really text, just a picture. At this point you need computer programs to manage that job ( Kurzweil 3000, ClaroRead Pro, etc) – at least from my knowledge. PDF Connoisseur is supposed to do that also but I have not had success with the app.
To my knowledge other than ClaroPDF, we are just not there yet with those capabilities. Another option is to scan worksheets so they are in text editable format then open them up in apps to complete.
Hope that helps!
Carol
Do you know if the creators of the snap typ app will be expanding it to android products?
Hi Stacy, I am sorry to say I don’t know if they will be developing for Android. For many developers it is an affordability issue. I will do some checking to see if that might be the case and let you know if I find info. Thank you for your contact. It would be great if they do!
Carol
We use the same worksheet over and don’t want to have to retake the picture every time. e.g. Hangman I don’t want to save the info typed. Is there a way to clear the information typed all at once or an undo button with out going into each typed word and backspacing? The undo works great for the touch drawing but not when you use the keyboard.
Good question, I will need to try that out. A quick thought is to keep a photo, then copy it and use copies for a fast way of starting a new hangman activity. You can also duplicate a document in snaptype, so you might want to try to duplicate the document so you have a blank one always available.
Hope that helps.