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Aphasiologists have spent relatively less attention on literacy in persons with aphasia when compared to verbal expression and auditory comprehension. However, beginning in the late 1990s practitioners and researchers oriented toward treating the functional barriers associated with aphasia that prevented person with aphasia (PWAs) from participating in their community and regaining independence. This included studying the literacy practices of and the educational materials for individuals with aphasia.

The earliest treatments of writing were focused at the word level for naming and spelling and many writing treatments continue to focus on the single word and its accurate spelling. Rehabilitation programs began to focus on larger units of meaning, by using sentence level stimuli and responses. But treatments at the word and sentence level continued to employ decontextualized stimuli with its inherent generalization problems. Beginning in the mid-2000s, as technology advanced and became increasingly successful, aphasia treatment programs for writing have increasingly employed computer aided writing supports using speech-to-text, word prediction, and spell check applications to reduce the cognitive-linguistic load of written formulation for persons with aphasia. The support provided by accessibility engineered computer programs has allowed clinicians to create treatment programs that enable PWAs to write lengthier, novel information that generalizes out of the clinic setting.