7 Accessible Writing Tools Poets Actually Use
Dictation, large print, read-aloud playback and four more accessible writing tools poets rely on, with a one-week drafting plan and a judge's honest take on how voice-composed poems sound different.
The best poem I scored last spring was composed in a parked car, spoken into a phone by a poet whose hands no longer manage a keyboard for more than a few minutes. She told me this afterward, in an email, almost apologizing. She should not have apologized. Her lines had a spoken warmth most typed entries never reach. Accessible writing tools are not a lesser doorway into poetry. Some of them are a better doorway, and I want to walk through the seven I see working, because the history of our art was never as keyboard-bound as we pretend.
Milton went blind in his forties and dictated Paradise Lost to whoever was in the room, often his daughters. Wordsworth composed on foot and wrote lines down later. The idea that a poem must be silently typed by two working hands into a glowing rectangle is about thirty years old. Poetry is several thousand years old, and most of those years were spoken.
Why Accessible Writing Tools Are Craft Tools
Let me make the strong claim first: accessible writing tools are craft tools, full stop, useful to every poet and essential to some. A tool built for a poet with low vision, tremor, chronic pain, dyslexia, or fatigue almost always turns out to sharpen something for everyone else too. Read-aloud playback was built as an access feature. It is now the single most reliable way I know to catch a limping rhythm in anyone's draft.
So drop the apology before we start. Nobody asks a novelist to feel guilty about spellcheck. The seven tools below are ordered roughly from most to least transformative for the poems themselves.
The Seven Tools, and What Each One Changes
- 1. Dictation. Built into every modern phone and computer. You speak, it types. Punctuation is spoken aloud, which feels absurd for a week and then becomes invisible. This is the big one, and I give it a full section below, because dictation does not just record your poem. It changes your poem.
- 2. Large print and zoom. Enlarging your draft to 200 percent is not just easier on the eyes. It slows your reading to nearly the pace of a listener, and slow reading exposes weak words the way low tide exposes rocks. I edit my own work zoomed in, and I have full vision.
- 3. Read-aloud playback and screen readers. Have the machine read your poem back in its flat, unimpressed voice. Your own voice performs the draft and hides its flaws. The synthetic voice performs nothing, so every clogged line clunks audibly. Poets who use screen readers full time often develop superb ears for meter for exactly this reason.
- 4. Voice memos as a field notebook. Not dictation-to-text, just raw audio. Capture the overheard phrase, the image at the bus stop, the line that arrives in the shower's general direction. Transcribe weekly. Zero handwriting, zero typing, zero lost lines.
- 5. High contrast and dark modes. Trivial to enable, meaningful for migraine, light sensitivity, and plain end-of-day fatigue. A poet who can draft for forty comfortable minutes instead of ten strained ones writes four times the poems. Volume matters more than talent in year one. I will defend that opinion anywhere.
- 6. Word prediction and switch access. For poets with limited fine motor control, predictive text and switch-based input make composition possible at all. One caution from the judging table: turn prediction off during revision if you can, because it nudges everyone toward the most common next word, and the most common next word is rarely the poem's word.
- 7. Paper, reimagined. Index cards with one line each, felt-tip pens that need no grip pressure, clipboard-on-lap instead of desk-and-chair. Accessibility is not always digital. Some of it is furniture.
The poem does not care which door it enters through. It only cares that you opened one.
What Dictation Does to Your Line
Here is the part almost nobody tells you: dictated drafts sound different, and mostly in good ways. Speech runs on breath, and breath is the original line break. Typed poets often build lines with their eyes, ten to twelve words of visual balance. Speaking poets build lines with their lungs, and lungs prefer shorter, punchier units with natural stresses.
Watch it happen. Here is a line I typed for a draft about my grandfather's shed:
The shed where he kept everything he could not bring himself to repair or discard remained locked.
Eyes wrote that. It is a paragraph wearing a poem's clothes. When I redrafted the same moment out loud on a walk, the phone caught this:
He locked the shed.
Broken things deserve privacy too.
Two breaths, two lines, and suddenly there is a person in it, with a worldview. The second version made it into the finished poem. The first version made it into the recycling. I now dictate the first draft of almost everything and type only the revisions, and my hands work fine. The method is simply better for first drafts than my typing brain is.
Milton Did Not Wait for Better Hands
When Milton lost his sight, he wrote his most famous sonnet about exactly that fear, the fear that his instrument was gone:
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless...
Then he went on to compose the most technically ambitious poem in the English language, entirely by voice and memory, holding dozens of lines in his head each morning until someone arrived to take them down. He called it being milked. I think about that every time a poet tells me they cannot really write because they cannot manage a keyboard, a pen, a desk, or a quiet room. The instrument was never the hand. The instrument was never the eye. The instrument is attention, and attention has many outlets.
A One Week Voice Drafting Plan
If you have never composed by voice, here is the exact plan I give workshop students. It takes one week and about fifteen minutes a day.
- Day 1: Learn your device's dictation trigger and the spoken commands for comma, period, and new line. Dictate a grocery list, then a memory of a kitchen. No quality standards. You are learning the pedals.
- Day 2: Dictate for five minutes about one object you can see. Do not read it back yet. The urge to check is the typing brain asking for its job back.
- Day 3: Read Day 2's transcript. Circle the three most alive phrases. Notice how many arrived at the ends of breaths.
- Day 4: Dictate a draft that uses all three circled phrases. Walk while you do it if walking is available to you. Movement loosens syntax.
- Day 5: Revise on screen, zoomed to 200 percent, breaking lines where your breath actually fell.
- Day 6: Have read-aloud playback perform the revision. Fix whatever the flat voice tripped over.
- Day 7: Send the poem somewhere. A friend, a workshop, a contest. Drafts that stay in the phone teach you nothing about endings.
On that last point, our monthly contest at Writory takes entries from the 1st to the 25th, and every entrant receives a five-part score breakdown, which makes it a low-stakes way to find out how a voice-drafted poem lands with readers who have no idea how it was made. That is the real test. Nobody scores your method. They score the poem.
The Ramp Improves the Building
There is a principle in architecture that a ramp built for wheelchairs ends up serving parents with strollers, travelers with suitcases, and everyone on an icy morning. Writing tools work the same way. The poet who needs dictation and the poet who merely tries it both end up with breath in their lines. The poet who needs large print and the poet who merely tries it both end up reading slowly enough to catch the dead words.
So if you need these tools, use them without a syllable of apology, and if you do not need them, borrow them anyway, because at least two of the seven will improve your drafts within a month. The woman who wrote that spring poem in her parked car has entered every month since, poets from over fifty countries alongside her, and her hands have nothing to do with why her work keeps rising up my stack. Her attention does. Build whatever ramp gets your attention to the page, and let the page do the rest. If you want more on shaping what arrives, start with our guide to the line break, the oldest accessibility feature poetry ever invented: it lets the poem breathe.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.