@Railingsohno
Thanks re. DSA- we’ll hold off on the laptop I think. He’s had Mac all through school so he is used to Macs however his course is very essay/reading heavy and he’ll really need all the help he can get regarding software/text to speech etc....We live near an Apple store so can always pop in the day before if we need to!
I'm a mature student - but I get DSA (university picked up the ragingly undiagnosed dyslexia that I've lived with through a previous degree, PGCE and life - I assumed it was normal to not understand anything until I'd read it five bloody times!)
Basically once you've got the supporting paperwork you apply for it - they will send you for a needs assessment - which is actually really informal and I found very supportive and interesting (I've got a big interest in assistive technology anyway as I've got a daughter with dyspraxia who relies on tech a lot to get around her difficulties with motor skills and handwriting). I found it quite jarring how I'd gone from fighting with the school SEN system for every single scrap of support - to uni where it was "OK so if you're capable of getting a first - our job is not just to scrape you through - it's to put in place whatever is needed to get you to where you can get that first".
Basically the assessor went through a load of different software that might be of use and then they put together a long report justifying why it all should be needed - and they obtain quotes from three suppliers to get it supplied - then it goes off to the funding body for approval and the suppliers get in touch to sort it all out.
If you want them to provide the laptop you have to pay £200 contribution - the laptop specs are decent enough as a good workhorse computer but the basic models they supply can be a bit irritating - everyone I know with a DSA laptop has had issues with theirs or has upgraded to a different machine over the course of the year. The big issue with them is the weight and battery life - we all end up scrapping for the seats next to the power sockets in lectures! You can pay more to upgrade from the base spec machine when you get in touch with the supplier about your DSA quote.
I got my DSA through later on (as uni picked my issues up) - and so I'd seen all of this and I just bought my own laptop and then the assessor asked for the specs of it prior to the needs assessment to check it would run anything recommended (you can find the base specs online if you google them) and they quoted to supply and install everything onto it and to cover insurance for it for the duration of the course.
I've since changed laptop to a Macbook (because I'm a tech addict basically and they're so shiny) - and I had my licence codes from the DSA install and installed the bulk of my software across myself. I couldn't transfer over Dragon as the version isn't on the Mac, and Medincle (which is a dictionary addon for Dragon, Word etc for medical terminology) - but my screen reading software (I use read and write gold - there's a free trial around to give that a go if you're interested) and lecture recording software (Sonocent Audio Notetaker - can get a free trial of that as well - I had several with different email addresses until my DSA came through) has transferred over fine. The one issue I've found with Sonocent on the Mac which is only really an issue now we've moved to online lectures - is that, unlike the PC version - it doesn't have the option to record from the computer speakers - on the PC version I could watch a lecture on my uni's replay software and just record the audio feed alongside my lecture slides and take notes as I went along - I can't do that on the Mac - I could record from the microphone but not from something playing on the Mac.
I'd recommend getting a play around with free trial versions of software anyway - I think the screen reading functionality of Read and Write Gold is included in the free version anyway. It's also got a great feature where you can highlight text in different colours and then pull all the chunks of highlighting into a Word document. I was like "holy fuck this is how reading is meant to be" when I first used the text to speech alongside reading something - it was that marked a difference! (It also does screen overlay and a reading ruler which I use a LOT)
www.studentfinancewales.co.uk/media/198753/slc-dsa-computer-specification-matrix-november-2019.pdf is I think the current DSA computer specifications to give you some guidance. For what it's worth I'm running most of my stuff on an i5 version of the Macbook Air and it struggles a little bit with lecture recording sometimes.