Looking for tech advice for brother

Family
1

He is in his 60s and was diagnosed decades ago. He lives alone and diligently fills notebooks with ideas, has done this for years. He has long wanted to write or finish a book. I want to encourage him if possible. His handwriting is pretty illegible but his ideas are ones he would like to see printed out.

I bought him an electric typewriter years ago but the keys are too touchy and he can’t make it work. Old typewriters out there these days seem worthless other than as decoration.

The speech-to-tech options that I’ve seen so far all require internet connectivity. I don’t want that for him. I’ve posted about that before in this forum.

So far, I’ve come up with: a small old-time recorder with cassettes, which would require him to read off his notebooks and I or someone else to listen and type out his thoughts. Not desirable. A handheld recorder as used by students to record lectures, which can put it on to a zip drive, which I could then take and run through dictation software on my computer and print out.

I’m not tech smart. The above information took me awhile to figure out.

Could anyone help me with further suggestions?

2

Off-line speech to text is available on most computers and smartphones today as an accessibility option for the disabled. An older offline phone or tablet without service with this feature enabled would be my first thought.

Another tool I feel maybe helpful that might be available offline is generically called a mind mapping application. It allows a user to type up notes as thought bubbles and arrange them in a hierarchy. I find as a diagnosed person my thoughts often come out sporadically in a non linear fashion and being able to organize them into more linear and coherent patterns, makes things easier to communicate them to other people.