Syllables is an open ended software which has been developed by Pantelis Makris (Inspector of Special Education), from Cyprus, (makrisp@cytanet.com.cy), a special needs professional with almost four decades of experience in special education and three decades of research, design, and application work with assistive technology. Most of his software work is open ended teaching tools easily applicable to other languages.

The program Syllables is designed to support the reading ability of children who attend the first class of primary school. Specifically, it aims at helping children to develop the necessary speed of reading and the appropriate easiness in reading. Through the use of this program, the children can also improve their vocabulary and spelling since they have the opportunity to be in direct contact with many grammatical phenomena which are part of the words used in this program.

This program allows for the child to work with words of maximum five syllables but it is suggested that teachers start with words with two syllables which are more common in the first class of primary school. The linguistic material is also taken from everyday vocabulary.

Moreover, the program is open for the addition of new words, deletion and updating by the teacher. Furthermore, the user can evaluate themselves, through the automatic counting of the correct answers.