The subject of voice recognition comes up every so often. I’ve recently purchased DNS 8 Preferred and I have to say this is by far the best voice recognition that I’ve received with any product. It is an excellent tool for many high school or college students (or beyond. Victoria, you really should try it as you frequently talk about your difficulty with output and this is such an easy program to use. The length of so many of your posts is amazing considering your difficulty and this will certainly make your life easier.)
In addition, this software can be almost entirely hands free (except for turning it on upon computer start-up) so navigation can occur with voice commands. This is especially important for students who are physically disabled (such as quadraplegics) as it increases their written output independence dramatically.
This one is worth a second look. An excellent article to ensure accuracy can be found at
http://www.emicrophones.com/docdetails.asp?documentid=38.
There are also materials out there to help students with language disabilities through the training process; products that were out there with previous versions when they were more needed, but I suspect make all the difference. (http://www.keyspell.com)
Right now I am trying to figure out a way to set up a course where learning to use the technology would be integrated into a college writing course. The 1-credit course in using voice recognition is in danger of being phased out becuase of lack of students… just when it could really make a difference for many of them. (I’m not even talking about students wtih documented disabilities; just our many students for whom typing and spelling are one more barrier between them and successful writing. )