Guides

Speech to text for dysgraphia on a Mac: say it, shape it, check it

By Ryleigh Newman · Published October 5, 2026

Speech to text for dysgraphia on a Mac means getting your ideas down by talking instead of handwriting or typing them: you say the sentence, and the app types it at your cursor in any app, spelled and punctuated. YapToText, the free app I built, does that on your Mac, can hold the text for a look before it lands, and lets you fix it by voice. The Mac itself can read it back to you.

I should be plain about where I am coming from. I built YapToText because my hands make typing difficult, not with dysgraphia in mind, and I am not a clinician. So this page makes no promises about writing, spelling or handwriting. It describes what each setting does, and you are the judge of whether it fits. If spelling and reading back are the main things for you, the speech to text for dyslexia guide goes deeper on both. The app is free with no account, so trying it costs an afternoon, not money. The limits are further down.

Download for free. No account, nothing locked, macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. Source on GitHub.

Steps

1. Click where the words go, tap Right Command, say the sentence, and tap Right Command again.
2. Add names and terms on the Dictionaries page, or select the right spelling, tap Right Option and say add this to my dictionary.
3. Press 4 while you talk for Note mode's headings and bullets, or end a dictation with as a bullet list.
4. Turn on Review before inserting in Settings, Advanced, Text output, then press Command Return to insert or Esc to discard.
5. Select a sentence, tap Right Option, say the change, and tap Right Option again.
6. Turn on Speak selection in System Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak, select the text and press Option-Esc to hear it.

Get your ideas down by voice

When the hard part of writing is the act itself, forming the letters or finding the keys, and the ideas are already there, dictation moves the job from your hand to your voice. You say the sentence; the app does the letters, the spacing and most of the punctuation.

Step 1: Click where the words go

• You: Click into the document, the email, the worksheet file or the box you want to write in.
• YapToText: Nothing yet. It types into the app in front, never into its own window.
• Check: The cursor is blinking where you want the words.

Step 2: Tap Right Command and say it

• You: Tap Right Command once and say the sentence the way you would explain it to a person.
• YapToText: Opens the floating panel with your voice as a wave and your words as they form.
• Check: The wave moves when you speak. If it stays flat, the app is not hearing your microphone yet.

Step 3: Tap it again

• You: Tap Right Command again.
• YapToText: Finishes the transcript on your Mac, pastes it at the cursor and puts back whatever you had copied before.
• Check: The words are where the cursor was. If they went to the clipboard instead, Accessibility is not on yet.

Thinking out loud has gaps, and nothing here punishes them:

• No silence cutoff. Auto-stop after silence, in the Recording card of the Dictation page, is off by default, so a pause to find the next idea does not end the dictation.
• A pause button. Space pauses and resumes while a dictation runs, and the space is never typed.
• No word cap. A long dictation is transcribed in pieces while you are still talking, and one recording stops itself only after 30 minutes, as a safety net.

Punctuation mostly takes care of itself. Whisper, the speech model inside YapToText, punctuates ordinary speech, and for a mark it cannot guess you say its name at the end of the clause, such as question mark or new paragraph; the spoken punctuation guide lists every name. Intelligent Insert reads the words around your cursor, so a dictation dropped into the middle of a sentence matches the spacing and capitalization around it.

YapToText is free on the Mac App Store, with no account, no subscription and no paid tier. It needs an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later, and your voice never leaves the Mac. The first dictation guide covers the two permissions it asks for.

Say the word, skip the spelling

Dictation never asks you to spell a word out. You say it, and Whisper writes a spelling for it. Names and terms, a teacher's surname, a classmate, a course code, a street, are what it most often mishears. Dictionaries fix that. Each entry says when you hear this, write that, and it applies to every dictation from then on. Teach a spelling once, and it is applied to every dictation after that.

There are four ways to add an entry, and only one of them involves typing:

• From a selection. Select the right spelling anywhere on screen, such as in an email someone sent you or on a class page, tap the Quick Edit key, Right Option, and say add this to my dictionary. The card says Added, with the word in quotes.
• From a correction. Right after a dictation lands, say replace, the wrong word, with, the right word. Fix the same mishearing twice and the Home page asks Make this correction stick?
• From a suggestion. With Suggest fixes from my dictations on, the default, words the app keeps having to recapitalize show up under Suggested for you. Nothing is added until you press the plus button.
• By hand. On the Dictionaries page, in a dictionary such as General, put the spelling the app wrote in Heard and the spelling you want in Replace with, then press Add.

Before Whisper decodes your audio, the app also hands it a short list of your spellings, as many as fit, which leans it toward them. A word that sounds like another word can still land as the wrong one, and that is what the look and the read-back further down are for. The Dictionaries guide covers Whole word, Case and keeping several dictionaries.

Turn a ramble into a shape with Note mode

Putting ideas in order is often where writing stalls, and talking lets you start before the order is clear. Say it in whatever order it comes, then let Note mode sort it into short headings and bullets, with action items pulled into a list. Note mode adds nothing you did not say. Talk it out in any order, and let Note mode give it a shape.

Say: At the end of any dictation, while Auto mode is on.

as a bullet list

What happens: The phrase is not typed, and the dictation comes out as a bulleted list. Say as a note instead for a tidy note.

Auto mode never turns speech into a list on its own, so asking is how you get one. Three other ways to reach Note mode:

• For one dictation. While you talk, press 4, Note's number in the default order with Auto on. The next dictation goes back to Auto.
• From its own shortcut. In Note mode's editor on the Modes page, under Basics, an Activation shortcut starts a dictation in Note mode from anywhere; press it again to stop.
• After the fact. On the Utility page, press Dictate on the scratchpad and talk, then press Send below to pass the text to Transform text, pick Note and press Transform. Scratchpad dictations are not saved to History, so copy out what you want to keep.

When you do not ask for a shape, your words stay yours. Auto mode, the default, gives ordinary prose a careful pass that fixes misheard words, punctuation and capitalization, and keeps your wording, tone and sentence structure. If the result reads like an assistant's reply or grows well past what you said, the app throws it away and types the raw transcript instead. For exactly what you said, press 2 while you talk for Raw Transcription, which uses no AI model at all. The modes guide covers each mode.

Look before it lands

By default the words go straight to your cursor. If you would rather see them first, Review before inserting holds the finished text in a small floating editor until you say so. Review before inserting gives you a look before anything reaches the page.

Step 1: Turn it on

• You: Open Settings, Advanced, Text output, and turn on Review before inserting. It is off by default.
• YapToText: From the next dictation, finished text opens in the floating editor instead of landing at the cursor.
• Check: Only for long dictations (200+ characters) is on while Review is on, so short ones still land directly. Switch it off if you want every dictation held.

Step 2: Read it, then decide

• You: Read the text in the editor.
• YapToText: Command Return inserts it at your cursor; Esc discards it.
• Check: The text lands only when you press Command Return.

History keeps your last 500 dictations for 30 days by default, each with what the speech model heard and what was delivered, and every entry can be copied or inserted again.

Fix it by voice, not by retyping

Going back into a sentence to change it is writing all over again. Two kinds of fix skip that. Select it, say the change, and nothing is retyped.

Say: As the whole next dictation, within 30 seconds of the last one landing.

scratch that

What happens: The dictation you just made is taken back. replace X with Y works the same way and swaps one word or phrase in place. Only the exact whole phrase counts, and both need Insert text automatically, which is on by default.

For anything bigger there is Quick Edit, which rewrites selected text by voice in any app:

Step 1: Select the words

• You: Highlight the sentence, or the one word, you want changed.
• YapToText: Nothing yet.
• Check: The words are highlighted.

Step 2: Tap Right Option and say the change

• You: Tap Right Option, say what you want, and tap it again.
• YapToText: Shows your instruction in quotes on the Quick Edit card, applies it on your Mac and replaces the selection.
• Check: The card says Done. If nothing changed, it says so.

Things to say: fix the grammar, make this shorter, capitalize this, or turn it into bullet points. An exact swap such as change this to necessary skips the AI and puts in the words exactly as you said them. While the card says Applying your edit, one press of Esc cancels and leaves your text as it was. The Quick Edit guide lists the rest.

Hear it read back

Reading over what you wrote is part of the job, and hearing it is another way to do it. YapToText does not read text aloud. The Mac does, with Apple's Speak selection, and the two sit side by side. Dictate with YapToText, listen with the Mac.

Step 1: Turn on Speak selection

• You: Choose Apple menu, System Settings, click Accessibility in the sidebar, then click Read & Speak. On earlier versions of macOS, Apple's guide calls it Spoken Content. Turn on Speak selection.
• macOS: Speaks the text you select whenever you press its keyboard shortcut, Option-Esc by default.
• Check: The switch is on. Click the button next to Speak selection to change the shortcut.

Step 2: Select the text and listen

• You: Select the paragraph you just dictated and press Option-Esc.
• macOS: Reads it aloud. Apple says that if no text is selected, the available text items in the current window are spoken.
• Check: You hear the words that are on the page, not the ones you meant to say.

Apple's Read & Speak settings can highlight words, sentences or both as they are spoken, and its guide to having your Mac speak text describes an onscreen controller for changing the speaking rate and skipping forward or back.

One honest note: I have not tested Speak selection alongside YapToText's keys. If Option-Esc ever wakes Quick Edit, which sits on Right Option, change one of the two: Speak selection's shortcut in Apple's settings, or the Quick Edit key on YapToText's Quick Edit page. There is a second kind of read-back too: every History entry keeps the recording by default, and its play button lets you hear what you actually said. The dyslexia guide has more on pairing the two.

If it is not working for you yet

Most first-week trouble is one of a few things. Climb this ladder, smallest step first:

1. Paste. Press Command V. If the words are there, they went to the clipboard because Accessibility is off or the app could not be brought to the front.
2. Check the microphone. In Settings, General, Microphone, say a few words: the app rates how clearly it hears you and says what to change.
3. Read the raw transcript. If one word keeps coming out wrong, open History and click Show pipeline details on that dictation. Use the spelling the speech model wrote in Heard, or press Generate variations on the entry.
4. Ask for less help. If the result changed more than you wanted, press 2 while you talk for Raw Transcription, or turn on Review before inserting so you see it first.
5. Check the silence setting. If a dictation ended while you were thinking, Auto-stop after silence in the Recording card should read Off.

A consistent mishearing is what dictionaries are for; the look and the read-back catch the rest. The troubleshooting guide covers anything else.

What it cannot do

• Make claims about dysgraphia. It is a dictation app. It was not designed, studied or tuned for dysgraphia; it is a general tool that happens to fit some of the same jobs.
• Help with pen and paper. It types on a Mac. It does nothing for handwriting, a paper form or a printed worksheet.
• Read aloud. YapToText does not speak your text. That is Apple's Speak selection, which is part of macOS and not connected to the app.
• Supply the ideas. It types what you say, and Note mode only restates it. If a word or an idea is not coming, the app cannot provide it.
• Promise accuracy. The speech model is Whisper Large v3 Turbo, a general-purpose model. I have not measured an accuracy rate, so I will not quote one.
• Run everywhere. It needs an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later. There is no iPhone, iPad, Windows or Linux version, and nothing is claimed for Intel Macs.

If you are putting together assistive technology for school or work, the accessibility page covers Voice Control and VoiceOver alongside the app, and the guide for students covers essays and notes by voice.

The short version

• Say it. Tap Right Command, talk, tap again, and the words land at your cursor in any app, spelled and punctuated.
• Shape it. End with as a bullet list, or press 4 for Note mode's headings and bullets.
• Check it. Review before inserting holds the text for a look, and Apple's Speak selection reads it back with Option-Esc.
• Fix it. Select it, tap Right Option, and say the change.

Say the idea, shape it, hear it, then send it.

If you have dysgraphia and something here does not fit how you write, I would like to hear it, because I built this for my own hands. Open an issue on GitHub. Every one gets read.

Download for free. No account, nothing locked, macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. Source on GitHub.

About the author. Ryleigh Newman is a developer whose hands make typing difficult and who dictates every day with YapToText, the app this site describes. Facts about other apps come from their own sites, with the date they were read. More about the project.

Related

• Speech to text for dyslexia on a Mac: say it, check it, hear it back
• Quick Edit: select text anywhere and say what you want changed
• Dictation modes: the same words, shaped for where they are going
• Dictation for students on a Mac: essays, lectures and study notes by voice
• Free dictation software for disabled people on a Mac
• Dictation for ADHD on a Mac: get the thought down, sort it out later

Sources

• https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-read-speak-settings-for-accessibility-spch638/mac (checked 2026-10-05)
• https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mh27448/mac (checked 2026-10-05)
• https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yaptotext/id6786382289 (checked 2026-10-03)

Questions