Daniella Ghunaim's vision is limited to light perception because of an inoperable tumor on her optic nerve. The 10-year-old will be getting new voice-to-text and text-to-voice electronic equipment to help her in classes at Aventura Waterways K-8 school.

''We're very grateful,'' says her mother, Patricia Maya Ghunaim.

The equipment comes from a program at the University of Miami Medical School that helps kids with learning deficits caused by cancer, sickle cell, HIV and other diseases. The program has run informally for 20 years at the UM's Mailman Center for Child Development.

Earlier this week that program got a new name, Second Chance, and a $75,000 donation from the Miami-based Kids and Family Foundation, which said it will devote its fundraising in the future to the program.

''We hope to be a cornerstone for this program, which does so much good,'' Carlos Trueba, foundation chairman, said at a ceremony Wednesday announcing the donation.

The Mailman Center program helps children cope with special learning deficits caused not by the usual genetic factors but by chronic childhood diseases and the sometimes-toxic treatments that fight them.

The program receives financial support of up to $700,000 a year from the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. The new funding source will help it expand its programs.

Miami-Dade Schools special education programs -- designed for children with inherited learning abilities such as dyslexia -- sometimes have trouble coping with the different disabilities caused by diseases and the chemotherapy, radiation and surgery used to fight them, said Daniel Armstrong, director of the Mailman Center.

Inherited learning disabilities tend to be stable and unchanging, he said. Disabilities caused by the trauma of illness often change and become worse over time.

''You might find a child with good language skills developed before he had a brain tumor at age 4,'' Armstrong said. ``So his verbal skills are good, but the part of his brain that controls writing may be damaged.''

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