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.
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 to other people.
I’ll look into that and I’ll explore the mind mapping, too.
He has a very old phone without service, so the accessibility option you mention may exist there, or I may have to upgrade him to a less-than-new version of a smartphone that has that function. Ditto for the computer; I have an old one of mine that I could try setting up without service in order to use this off-line speech to text. Sounds easy but this will take me awhile to get going.
Hi, I actually helped someone with schizophrenia publish a book from their notebooks myself. I typed or scanned images from them to do it, but I do recommend doing kindle direct, or something similar, when it comes time to make it into a book. It has formatting tools and instructions to copy and paste into the book creation, and you can buy final author copies for less when finished, if you’re trying to make it a book.
I know for schools Otter is a voice to text app. Not sure if it needs a internet connection.
Happy to hear you’re trying to help with this! Good luck!
You could do voice to text upload that into word doc and save the pages (set the pages to the size of the book pages so you know what will fit and how it generally looks). Then upload those page files into a book creation program.
Hello. I saw your reply earlier this week, but I was traveling and away from my computer and unable to use my phone to login and answer. Anyway, thank you for the suggestion and more importantly for sharing that you also did something like this for someone with a serious mental illness.
I don’t know how it’ll go with my brother, whether it’s just for him to see or if we take it further.
I will look into Otter, and see about voice to text upload (once I figure out what that is.)
Thanks again. I really appreciate your suggestions.