they're able to identify certain words and can possibly phonetically understand unfamiliar words if you give them a minute to say it out loud. They're also often able to recognize numbers without problem.

A lot of the folk I worked with got help from their kids or from something like a Wal-Mart tax prep service. Usually they're able to write their own name, recite the alphabet, and perhaps recognize every word in a sentence like "My dog is brown." The technique I usually saw was they'd have a repository in their heads of the first few letters of a word, usually two or three, then assume the word is one they've memorized. So I had a few students who would struggle at first to see the distinction between words like trim and train, or table and taken. In terms of social media, it was pretty common for the students to ask me how to use Facebook, so I'm going to guess the answer is they either get help from their family or they simply don't use it at all.