Different audio experiences

Voice

As part of the Inclusive Technologies for Reading course I have explored various ways that “voice” can be used to help students with print disabilities. Text-to-speech (TTS) and audio can support dyslexic and visually impaired students. E.A Draffen says TTS voices “can place a greater demand on cognitive resources to facilitate understanding in comparison to natural voices”. They can be much harder to listen to more tiring and some find, more boring. However “high quality TTS and natural voice were more intelligible than the low quality TTS voices and high quality TTS voices resulted in higher comprehension scores”.

TTS which uses a bi-modal reading system where the text is highlighted as the words are spoken can be especially useful for dyslexic learners. It is useful to be able to control the speed of the voice. Normal readers can cope with 300 wpm and those that have been blind from birth can read at speeds of 400wpm listening to the more robotic voices. However dyslexics need higher quality voices at slower speeds of 150-180 wpm or even less.

Students will have personal preferences for a the voice. If possible, try out a range of voices with the student to see what works best for them. Try the more robotic voices, high quality voices, different gender, different age (children’s voices are available) and different countries and accents (e.g.Welsh, Scottish, Indian etc). Remember you can change the rate and pitch of the voices. Not all software will accept all voices.You may find that students prefer different voices for different reading tasks such as reading a quick note as opposed to a lengthier text or reading for information as opposed to reading purely for enjoyment.

WordTalk and Balabolka

WordTalk is an add-in to Word that will read Word documents easily with the built in Microsoft Anna voice. It also easily used the higher quality Amy and Brian voices I tried from Ivona. I did have problems downloading the free trial but Ivona were very helpful. The student can follow the text as it is highlighted and can save to an MP3 or WAV format to listen to later on an MP3 player.

Balabolka can read Word and PDF documents and use any SAPI voice on your computer and it too can create MP3 files.I tried this out with the various voices both inbuilt and commercial. Once voices are installed on your computer, Balabolka finds them and you can select and try out the different ones in a dropdown menu which is located through View – Show – Configure Voice.

Personally, I prefer to listen to the higher quality voices and will purchase probably two of the voices, one male and one female,  to demonstrate to schools when the trial period finishes..

Ivona Mini Reader

I have also tried out Ivona Mini Reader on a free trial with the Ivona voices and Microsoft Anna. It reads out any text that you highlight. I have found this very useful. It sits in an unobtrusive floating toolbar which lets you adjust speed, volume and select voices easily and quickly. It is ideal for helping students unobtrusively with a difficult sentence or word.

AMIS

I intend to try out AMIS to read DAISY books when I have time over the Easter holidays as I have had problems downloading this. For further information on how AMIS works I recommend that you look at “My experience with using the Daisy reader software EasyReader and Amis” by ictXplore

ClaroCom

ClaroCom is a new app designed primarily for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). An AAC app helps to replace speech or assist writing for those with difficulties in the production or comprehension of spoken or written language. The free app comes with two voices, Daniel and Serena, which are high quality TTS voices. Both can be adjusted for speaking rate from 90wpm to 240wpm. It comes with built in phrases but there is a window which you can type into and then tap the speech button to hear the words spoken. I think that this has possibilies for an easy support for writing for dyslexic students. It has the facility to email, copy and send messages. The Pro version has nine voices and feeds directly into Facebook and Twitter. I can see how older dyslexic students may really like being able to feed into social media easily.

Audiobooks

Another way of accessing print is to listen to an audio book which has been narrated. Audiobooks (www.audiobooks.org) has free audiobooks,  all MP3 format and iPod compatible. They have public domain books narrated by volunteers through Librivox (www.librivox.org). I listened to “Treasure Island” which was free and a Librivox production.This was an enjoyable listening experience. Expession and pronunciation was good and easier to listen to for a whole story than a TTS or robotic voice. Many dyslexic students never read for pleasure. Consequently their vocabulary suffers. One way to enable vocabulary development and also give them the pleasure of a good story, is to introduce them to listening to books. This is becoming increasily more accessible due to MP3 technology and apps. Recent research by Learning Ally (www.LearningAlly.org) a not-for-profit volunteer organisation in America, pointed to better scores in maths and reading test scores for readers with disabilities who use audiobooks.

I have used “Listening Books” (www.listening-books.org.uk) with primary students previously and they have really enjoyed this way of accessing stories. Membership costs £20 per year and members can have MP3 CDs sent through the post,download to a portable player or can listen to over a thousand audiobooks live through streaming.

Blio

Blio (www.blio.com) is a full-featured free e-reader which lets you see books as the author intended. It comes with TTS integration, with support for both a computerised voice and synchronisation with professionally recorded  audiobooks. I bought the Heather voice for £6.99 which I think sounded better in the sample than it did once purchased and reading a book. You can adjust the speed and volume of the voice but you cannot change the type face or size of type although you can change the page colour and the brightness. It does have bi-modal reading. I didn’t like the type and I found it awkward to change the settings while reading. It is difficult to find free books in the store.

My learning on ITR12 – practical implementations and challenges

My plan in Unit 1 was

1. to install WordTalk and some voices
2. improve my use of inclusive technologies
3. encourage others through the use of blogs/twitter
4. purchase an iPad or Kindle
5. use all the above to improve recommendations for dyslexic students.

1. Installing WordTalk was relatively simple once I found the right instrucrtions for my version of Word. I also eventually downloaded Balabolka although this took some help from Dominik in “office hours”. Students have faced difficulties as the school security system blocks it from downloading and some schools have the memory stick slots blocked. Installing voices has also been difficult. Ivona have been very helpful and I hope to have some new voices this week. I have perseverd with the voices I already had on my laptop. Some commercial software also does not run on my laptop as it is a 64-bit machine and not supported so it is probably not that the software is free that is causing the difficulties. I have student currently trialing this softwarebut with the free robotic sounding voices due to cost implications.

2. Improve use of inclusive technologies was a rather broad target. I have installed and trialled speech recognition software on the iPad and was very impressed with Dragon Dictation which is very accurate. My daughter uses Read&Write Gold Version 9 and I have tried that out so feel confident to discuss it with schools. I attended training at a local secondary schools for targetted dyslexic pupilis on using the LiveScribe pen following suggestions that this might be helpful to them. I can recommend this as a useful piece of technology. MyStudyBar proved very difficult to download and sme students have found it difficult to get to grips with but others have loved it. For primary level students I still recommend CoWriter or now the new Clicker Sentences or Clicker Docs for those schoools with iPads.

3. Encouraging others through the use of Twitter and blogging. Setting up and beginning to use Twitter took time and as the number of posts that I needed to look at increased this became more difficult on the small screen on the iPhone. This was overcome by purchasing an iPad. WordPress was a challenge as I had never done anything like it before. YouTube videos were very helpful whenever I got stuck as well as other course participants’ blogs. Getting the blog roll to work took ages. I have managed to incorporate links and screenshots but have struggled with screencasts. This is something I will continue to try to sort out after the course finishes. I use Twitter now and it has been extrememly useful. I will continue to use it and I will try to improve my blogging skills further.

4. Purchase an iPad or a Kindle has turned into purchase both. The iPad is in constant use and I don’t know how I managed before. It is so much faster than using a laptop. I have downloaded books and PDFs to it in iBooks and the Kindle app and read them. I have downloaded audio books and I am listening to it while driving around. I have also subscribed to various podcasts and enjoyed listening to them although it has been difficult to fiteverything in. Last night I downloaded ClaroCom for free. It is very easy to use and I can see lots of applications. I have tried out the Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, iPad, and Nook at home and had a good try-out of the others at John Lewis. My favourite is the Kindle due to its light weight, longer battery life and lower cost. Lots of schools have iPads so I can show how to use books on that format. For my dyslexic learners I woud have liked text-to-speech but this isn’t available on the newer Kindles. Some of the students liked the touch screen but, for those with dyspraxic difficulties, the basic Kindle with the buttons worked better. They didn’t find that pages scrolled over by mistake and then they had lost their place.

5. My target to use new knowledge from the course has been achieved gradually as the course continued. My recommendations are now fuller and give schools the option of commercial or free software to support students. Other useful strategies such as structured documents and cue cards are recommended when appropriate.