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bjbjz Computer: Recording started. Jim Stachowiak: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our I
believe it's our third major hour-long webinar on assistive technology tools. Today, we're
going to talk about assistive technology tools for reading because reading is such an important
part of academics, part of life. These tools can really be used by anybody. First of all,
we're going to talk about who can benefit from reading tools. We'll talk about what
to look for when choosing a reading tool. I'll give you a little bit of the flavor of
some of the different reading tools that are out there. We may cross a little but into
some of the things that we looked at in the free software webinar last month but we'll
try and not do too much overlap because there's plenty in the commercial area that we can
cover. I'm Jim Stachowiak. I'm with ICATER at the University of Iowa, the Iowa Center
for assistive technology education and research and we're in the College of Education and
this is part of our better future for Ireland's webinar series. Let's look at the first question
here. Who benefits from reading tools? We look at all kinds of different students students
with physical disability, visual impairment, learning disability, English language learners,
English as a second language students all these folks might benefit from having text
read out loud to them. What we've looked at is in assistive technology, we focus primarily
on kids who have print disabilities such as disabilities that affect them from accessing
a print textbook. Some of the physical disabilities we're talking about physical disabilities
that affect reading, not physical disabilities on the lower half of the body but ones such
as not being able to hold a book, turn the pages or any of that kind of thing, these
would fit under the physical disabilities that are print disabilities. People who have
these are who we might be looking at here. I think visual impairment speaks for itself.
For someone who can't see the text, he or she is going to have a hard time accessing
it. That could be an issue. Learning disabilities can affect the way people read in lots of
different ways. Dyslexia can affect decoding of words and comprehension of words. Learning
disabilities can affect attention span. People who have any of these can benefit from a reading
tool. Of course, an assessment of disability some of them might be learning English as
a second language or an English language learner, they may benefit from some of the features
that some of these reading tools have such has having things read out loud for them instead
of having them try to read the text. We're seeing more and more when we look at universal
design for learning. What we're finding is that a lot of students just tend to like listening
to things being read out loud or work better in auditory [inaudible]. Sometimes the student
just works better in an auditory format and that would be why they might benefit from
a reading tool. There are lots of things we want to look for with these reading tools
in what they can and can't do. We want to make sure we're trying to setup the tool for
the student. We want to make sure they fit our needs. The first thing we want to look
at and this might be one of the most important things to look at is what it can read, what
kind of text it can read. I don't know if you're going to find any that don't read editable
text. When I talk about editable text, I mean something in a Word document or a text editor,
anywhere where you can type something and then email. I think pretty much all of these
text readers read editable text. The next thing is PDF. There's lots of text in PDFs
out there. They read standard PDFs. They read any type of PDF. The big kind of hang-up with
PDFs is some things can be read, some things can't. PDFs aren't seen as text based. They're
in image and a lot of times when we get that is when documents are scanned in such as taking
a magazine article, scanning it to the computer, and saving the scan in PDF format. That scan
is often times recognized as an image and when it's recognized as an image, some of
these text reader's won't be able to read it. We want to make sure we can read all PDFs.
In websites, most of these readers have no problems reading websites. DAISY files are
another thing. DAISY is a format that's laid out for students who are blind or visually
impaired. What it does is that it basically tags a book so that people are able to navigate
it auditorily by chapters, by headings, and whatnot and tags in a certain way. Some of
these do, some of these don't read DAISY files. If you're accessing DAISY books, you want
to be able to have something that reads DAISY files. The other thing you want to know is
reading images. What I mean by images is not necessarily pictures in text but one of the
areas that we're moving toward with reading tools is being able to use a mobile device
that's got a camera on it to snap a picture of text and then have the reading tool read
it back out loud. I ll show you an example of some tools that can do that today. Because
most people have a phone or mobile device with a camera in their pockets that are very
easily accessible, they're able to snap a picture of a book. We want to know if text
readers can read those images or not. This is something we may want that may be important
to us as well. What else do we look for? We're looking for the available voices. Believe
it or not, that could be a major issue for people accessing the text what the voice sounds
like. These tools weren't necessarily super popular. These are all robotic voices. The
voices have gotten a lot better. What we want to look for is do they have a voice for their
students or a person's going to be able to listen to. If you can't stomach listening
to the voice, you're not going to sit there and you're not going to use the tool effectively.
We want to look at natural computer sounding mostly the more natural voices or ones that
people tend to gravitate toward. Those are getting better and better. The acapella of
voices are pretty good. The best ones out there right now are VW voices. If you see
anything with a VW voice like VW Paul or VW Kate, those tend to be the ones that people
enjoy listening to. Those tend to be the ones where you're more successful, listening to
some of those. You also want to make sure they have options for male and female voice.
Some people may prefer a male voice reading. Other people prefer a female voice reading.
Most of the options are I can't think of any that don't have those two options. Check what
languages are available especially if you're working with English language learners. Does
it read in other languages you might have access to? A lot of them do. A lot of them
are expensive ones. A lot of the more inexpensive ones may use English that you're looking at.
What features are available and what features do you need? Do you need highlighting words
while they read out loud so the student can't follow along? That's a big one. It's nice
to have that feature. Can you control your reading speed and how can you control your
reading speed? Some tools pretty much everything allows you to control your speed. Some tools,
it's more on a sliding bar kind of thing between 0 and 100. There's no real number you're zeroing
in on. I'm just kind of testing it and playing with it to see what sounds right. Others have
words per minute so it will read by a certain number of words per minute and that might
be something that helps the student because they can sit down and plug in their notebooks
and they're good to go. Sometimes we've got to think of does this have too many features?
Some of these tools have features for reading, writing, studying, and all kinds of different
things like that. That might be confusing to some folks because there are too many features.
We're starting to see a little bit of a trend maybe in one or two reading tools that are
coming out just the reading components and those are just maybe what the individual needs.
So, when you think about the number of features that are available as well and what we really
want to deal with, we want to look at how it pronounces things. So can we modify pronunciations?
What can we do? One of the areas where this came up is when the student that was reading
a Hunger Games book on the Read2Go app for Bookshare. When it came to the word bow, it
said bough and that was difficult for that student to get past and that happens a lot
in that book. That couldn't be changed and so there was some struggle there. Can we change
pronunciations? How does it pronounce words? What do we have to deal with there? Are there
keyboard shortcuts for people with physical disability? There again the access thing.
Is it all mouse driven? If it's mouse driven, it could be difficult for some individuals
to get involved and start using that. Several of these tools do have keyboard shortcuts
for reading, writing, pausing, stopping, or whatever they need to do. Having keyboard
shortcuts can be important as well. Is it easy to use? This can be a major factor for
having success. In one of my favorite tools, Read and Write Gold, there are three ways
to read different things. It can be confusing. It can be difficult to do things and if someone's
not in tune on how it works, maybe it's not the right tool for them. Are the tools available
across platforms? You want to look at being able to use it on a Mac or Windows based machine
especially if you're in a school that has multiple types of computers. You want to be
using the same tool across the school. A big thing we're starting to see now is that more
and more people want these tools available on the cloud. Are these tools available on
the cloud? Can I sit down at any computer, access them, and have access to my settings
and the way that I want things to be read? There are a few tools that allow us to do
that. We'll take a look at those today as well. Do you always want to look at cost,
determine what you can afford? The higher end ones are going to have more features.
They're going to be a little bit better at reading things. They have better voices. The
lower end ones have fewer features. They haven't had as many options, may not have voices as
good. Even though they're free, the student may really not want to use them. That kind
of leads us to our last thing and that's student acceptance. The key to making sure that these
things work is making sure the student or the users can accept them and is going to
be able to use them. We have a lot to look at, all those other things that lead up to
finding out whether or not the student is going to be able to use this and is going
to want to use it. Some of those things like looking at features, looking at ease of use,
looking at voices, these are going to tell us what the student's preferences are and
then after we've tried a few different things, we really want to make sure that they accept
that before we go ahead and decide that that's what we're going to use. I'm going to now,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my desktop here. I want to walk you through
several different types of reading tools. If you have questions, please feel free to
ask. Just type them into the chat box. Jenny will shoot them my way and we can go from
there. I'm shutting down. I can't see the chat box now but what I'm going to do is I'm
going to run you through five or six different reading tools here. We're just going to take
a look at the reading component. We're not going to look at adding any writing or any
of the other stuff. We'll point it out but we're not going to look at any of that. The
first one I want to take a look at is a tool called Read and Write Gold. We'll open this
up here. Read and Write Gold is one of my favorite reading tools. It's got a lot of
options and that's one of the things I tend to like about it. It's a tool that the university
here has purchased as a site license, so we've got access to all of this. Every computer
has access to it. Every student has access to it as well. There are definitely some downsides
to it and we'll see that once it opens and as we get rolling. Read and Write Gold is
the tool that sites across the top of the screen. As I mentioned earlier, we want to
make sure it can read all different types of texts and we don't have any issues with
that. It can read all different types of text. We'll pull up a Word document here to show
you the beginning of this. This Word document opened up and we'll show you how it operates.
This computer's a little bit old so it's kind of slow here today. I'm trying to run lots
of different things on it so I m sure that doesn't really help what it's doing. Read
and Write Gold, so we've got to open at the top of the screen, as I've mentioned, one
of the down sides to this is there are three different ways to read different things. It's
not good. It's not easy sometimes. It can be confusing. If you have a Word document
open, all you need to do is hit play. When you hit play here [Computer reading] You can
see it jumps in. It starts reading. It highlights what it reads. It's all good stuff that we
can follow on with what's being said here. The voice is okay. I'm going to play that
again so you can hear the voice. [Computer reading] It's not terrible. It's pretty good.
It's a little bit robotic. If we go and drop down here into these speech options, we could
take a look at this and see what we're using is a voice called Texthelp Jane. Texthelp
is a company that creates software. That's what is loaded in here. We've got access to
a Spanish voice here. We've got a male and a female voice. We look at this search button
here. We've got access to lots of different language voices. This will read in lots of
different languages as the male and female voice. Under this tab here is the pronunciation
option. We can change pronunciations of words throughout. For example, my last name, it
would read it like this. [Computer reading] It's actually pronounced Sta-kho-vee-yak so
you can change it here. [Computer reading] It reads it a little bit better. It's not
great but when I save it that way, now whenever it runs into Stachowiak, it should read it
properly. We've got the highlighting. We've got the reading. We've got the languages.
The other thing that we have here that's really nice is we can set this up how we wanted to
read. Some of our students with learning disabilities, they might struggle with seeing and listening
to things for one time. Their ADHD might kick in. They may only be able to handle a certain
paragraph or two at a time. If that's the case, we can set this up so it reads by sentence
or by paragraph and we can unselect this read next block in text. By doing that, what this
does is it will read until it hits the end of a sentence or paragraph and then stop.
We have to hit play again to make sure that it goes through and continues reading. That
way, we're not missing things that it's reading because we struggle with siting and paying
attention for long periods of time. We'll leave that as is right now but that is an
important option. If we go back to the speed options here, you can see this is where we
would change our speed. You can drag out faster, slower. You can slide it back and forth and
figure out what your optimal speed is before listening to it. We've got an option for testing
that voice here as well. That's how you read within a Word document in here. Now, the downside
of that is that as positively as it reads Word documents that way, the down side here
is we have to read other things different ways. If we want to read a PDF, we have to
go over here and open it through this button called PDF Aloud. Under PDF Aloud, we can
then go into search for our PDF. We'll find an example PDF here. When we do it this way
now, what it's going to do is it's actually going to load the controls for reading directly
into the PDF. We're not going to be using the controls up across the top anymore. What
we're going to be doing is we're going to have controls built into our PDF and it should
be if hit tools here now. We should see that these tools we should see a PDF Aloud tool
bar added into this and we don't. This is the new Acrobat. We may be having some trouble
with accessing it but what this is supposed to do is it's supposed to add a PDF toolbar
image here that we would then have these controls that you see on the top built directly into
the PDF. From there, we could hit play and we could listen to different parts of the
text. The fact that this didn't work is okay because it allows me to show you another option
for reading here. That option is this. This is called the screenshot reader. The screenshot
reader is actually a really neat tool here because this allows us to get access to any
text no matter what. Even if we have text in the PDF that wasn't working, text in the
PDF that's recognized as an image, text in an image that we took a picture of with our
camera, we could hit the screenshot reader, go into our PDF, draw a box around the text
that we want to have read and let go. What it's going to do is it's going to run what's
called optimal character recognition of this text. [Computer reading] It will read it out
loud for us. That is really a key component of this Read and Write Gold. Even though we
have to access different tools, different ways, what that allows to do is access any
text which is very helpful and a real positive component of this. If we look now we want
to show you a couple of things. I've showed you reading text in a Word document. I've
showed you reading text in a PDF. I've showed you the screen shot reader. Let's say we wanted
to read something on a website. What would we do now? Well, this is done a little differently
as well. Here's an article on the University of Iowa website. To read this, what we have
to do is go and get the drop down menu next to play and hit web highlighting. We just
hover our text. [Computer reading] We can go through it reads just by highlighting the
web. We don't have to hit play. We don't have to hit pause or do anything like that. We
just highlight the text and it goes and it reads from there. That's another way to read.
Another thing we do to add on this is an option this button here is for the DAISY reader.
If we have a book in DAISY format, we can click that and open it. It will allow us to
navigate it just as we'd navigate any other DAISY books. It does have the component to
read all different file formats in here. The wrap up of this I guess is that it has the
ability to read different file formats. It has a decent voice. It's not great. It's got
a slider bar that allows us to change up the speed which is okay. It's got a lot of features.
These features over here are all writing features. We've got our reading features. We've got
study features. If you hit this double arrow, there's even more features for highlighting
and researching. There are lots of features to it. That could be a positive or a negative,
depending on what our student needs. The downside to this is it can be confusing. There's lots
of different ways to read lots of different things. There's hitting the play button to
read the Word document. There's PDF Aloud for PDFs. There's the screenshot reader for
inaccessible PDFs and there's the web highlighting for reading the web. There are lots of different
ways to read lots of different things. Overall, this is a helpful tool. If you need some of
these extra things, this is a great thing to have. This is not necessarily this is not
available in [inaudible] but the way that you can purchase it, it can be helpful. If
you can purchase it at a USB drive, carry that with you as an individual and plug it
in any computer and run it off that because what it's going to do is it's going to run
off the USB drive so you won't have to install anything on the computer. That's kind of we
would make that mobile. The downside of that is it could be pretty easy to lose. We'll
open up another thing here. This is Kurzweil. Both Kurzweil and Read and Write Gold are
a little bit more on the expensive end. One of the things you'll see on Kurzweil when
you open it up is that it's a totally self-contained program. We're not working within other documents.
What I've done here is I've opened up a Word document into it. You can see it looks a little
bit different when we open up a Word document directly into it. If I hit read, this is what
it's going to sound like. [Computer reading] Actually, it has a really nice voice. This
uses a VW voice so you can see right over here, we got this drop down. We got lots of
different voices at the bottom. It's VW Julie and VW Paul. One of the strengths at Kurzweil
is that voice. It's a fantastic voice for listening to things. Our Word document looks
a little bit different when we open it up in here. We're not actually working with a
Word document. We're importing the text into Kurzweil. It will read but it's going to be
a little bit different. It's got the capability to do that with the PDFs as well. We can open
up a PDF directly into this. It's going to look a little bit different but it's going
to read it within Kurzweil and so it's a Kurzweil document. You can see here it's got a read
the web option. What this does if we click this is it adds web controls from Kurzweil
directly into Firefox or Internet Explorer. It allows you to read the web that way. Most
people reading is it's the same way. You just hit play and you listen once it's in here.
It'll open up a textbook to show you what it looks like when we pull a textbook into
this if I can get to it real quick. It looks like I don't have access to that right now
but basically the big thing for Kurzweil is what it allows to do is scan in text and we'll
see it on the screen the exact same way that we would see it typically. It's going to be
a textbook scanned into your computer that's going to allow us to read that book out loud.
What it doesn't have is it doesn't have one of those screenshot readers that TextHelp
does. We have text that's inaccessible. If we have an image, we're not going to be able
to read text within that image. What we do is we can scan things in and sometimes through
Kurzweil, by scanning things in through Kurzweil, scanning even through something else, it's
going to run that optical character recognition and it's going to show us how things are read.
It's going to allow us to read some of that text. It's got lots of things built into it.
It's got a dictionary definition. Read and Write Gold has that as well. It's got the
ability to read continuously. That means when we hit reading until we hit stop or it's the
end or we can do self-paced just like with Read and Write Gold. This one again, if we
hit play at the beginning of the sentence because the sentence is selected here [Computer
reading] It gives you when it stops, we would have to hit play and go from there. This is
another tool you can purchase on a USB drive so that you can get it it's a mobile tool
that way. It does have a web-based component. We'll take a look at that in just a second
here but you can see again, the nice thing about it and maybe a negative thing is it's
self-contained. So, it s all in one spot but the negative side is we re not interacting
or learn the whole new system. It does have keyboard shortcuts for reading. I m not sure
what they are off hand because I don t necessarily use them but it does have keyboard shortcuts
for play, stop, forward, back, and all of that stuff. Another nice thing here is the
way we control our speed. It s right here next to sentence, that s our words per minute
right now so we lock in whatever words per minute is and then we can have it read at
that level. 150 is around conversational pace. Once we get used to reading at that speed,
we can crank up our speed a little bit so we can get through things a little bit quicker,
maybe a little bit easier to access that but having that word per minute control where
we can sit down on any computer that has Kurzweil and just plug in our words per minute that
we know is our number. That makes it really easy and really helpful as well so it does
have words per minute. It does have highlighting and it has a great voice. It s all self-contained.
What it doesn t do is it doesn t read images very well and it doesn t allow us to work
within some of our other documents that doesn t have Canada out for reading inaccessible
text unless we want to go through the whole process of scanning something and that can
be a lengthy process. We could do a virtual scan. That could be lengthy as well if we
just want to read a little snippet and highlight that piece so it doesn t have that but and
I guess another downside for a lot of folks is there s a lot of features in here and this
could be a positive or a negative, this is all reading features, this is all studying
features, this is all writing features. That may be more than what most folks need so the
expense associated with all of that could be a drawback and I ll point out one other
thing that if you read here, we have languages. This is what it s got: English, Spanish, French,
German, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian. It ll read
in any of those languages, so if we have text in those languages it will pick that up and
read. So, that s Kurzweil. Again, it is a good tool. It s got a lot to it. It may not
be right for everybody because of the amount of things attached to it but it is a very,
very good overall tool. What I want to show you is Kurzweil s online piece and that s
called Firefly, they do have a website, it s fireflybykurzweil.com. Now, things can get
a little bit confusing with this. You have the enter login password. You get access from
many computers that have internet access. You can access it from a mobile device as
well. There s an app you can download to access Firefly, you cannot hurt his Firefly on its
own, however. To have access to Firefly, you have to be part of an institution that has
a site license of Kurzweil. That gets you access to firefly. So, if your school has
a site license, you can get in here and you can scan books in, load them into the private
library, you can access the public library. I ll open up the public library here and see
what we ve got. I guess we ve got nothing in there. Let me go back to my private library
then. I know I ve got a book in there. We can open this up and we got Lilly s for big
day loaded in here, a grade school type book, it s going to take a second to load but once
it s loaded you can kind of see at the top of the screen here so here s Lilly s big day
on the book scanning. It looks just like the textbooks. It s in color. You got the pictures.
You got the text down here at the bottom. So, up across the top of our screen is where
we got our options from within firefly. The big one in the middle is play, pause. If I
hit this [Computer reading] So, we can see it reads and it highlights. It uses that VW
voice but the downside to it is that it struggled through some of the stuff. It didn t really
do well with Mr. and Mrs. Here it s got stylized fonts on the beginning of this word. It s
going to struggle with that. Most of those readers will struggle with that. You re not
going to get too many that are going to do a good job when we start looking at something
like that. I believe here, it s going to pick up. If you look across the bottom, it s highlighting
these stamps from the curriculum lab here so it ll pick up text like that as well. If
we look under options, it does have the option for increasing your speed, for reading by
word, line, sentence, or paragraph. We can self paste it. Here s all our voices and I
believe all of those are VW voices so again we ve got really good access to voices there
and it s got just a couple others options of it. We can highlight text. We can look
up words in a dictionary. We can translate but the main component of Firefly is being
able to read text back out loud in a cloud format. So, I can go pick this up anywhere
and listen to it. You can pick it up and listen to it if I gave you my password on your computer
right now just to take a look at what it sounded like and what it was like so I don t believe
that Read and Write Gold does have some web apps that you can access for listening to
things. They do have another component that we ll look at a little bit later but this
cloud piece from Kurzweil Firefly here does allow us to save books on the cloud, access
them on any computer that we can have internet access on but again the downside to that is
you have to have a site license from Kurzweil at your school to be able to access these
but there is an example of kind of a cloud based reading technology. The next one I want
to show you], I ve shown you two that have full-fledged reading tools that have reading,
writing, studying, and all kinds of things like that. There has been a little bit of
a movement in cast feature reduction and that has really started. The leader in that right
now is Don Johnson who s created a tool that called Snap and Read which basically they
made for all the students that need help with reading but don t need all the other things.
They don t need the writing. They don t need the studying. They don t need all that other
stuff. So, what you re going to see with Snap and Read is you re going to look up to the
top right corner. You re going to see a little button that looks kind of like a camera lens
and I m not entirely sure you can see this because it might be sheering a little bit
if you can see it. Sometimes it shares over the top in a layer over the top of a projector.
It s hard to see on a projector sometimes. The way this works is it s just like the screenshot
reader from Read and Write Gold so we can open up any text and then we have the ability
to draw a box around that text and have it read out loud so we open up maybe a PDF here.
We ll open up a PDF and I can click on the screenshot reader and it s going to give me
these crosshairs. So, it s going to help me zero in on what I want to draw a box around.
I ll click and I ll drag and you can see it lights up around the text that we re going
to have read and when I let go, it s going to run its own optical character recognition.
[Computer reading] Start reading and highlighting. [Computer reading] It did okay there. On and,
it read that as angle. What it does have some issues with is it has issues with serifed
fonts. It struggles with those but for the most part it reads and it highlights pretty
well. What happens with this, where you get some issues with this is that if you don t
do a real good job drawing your box, you might get some issues with some of the text. So,
say we drew a box like this. [Computer reading] So, because I didn t get the whole word in
there it s struggling with that. What you ll see occasionally with this is you will
see ll draw a little red squiggly line under a word that means it s not sure that it s
going to be able to read it correctly and it highlights it in red. It knows it s not
going to be able to read it correctly. It s just going to skip it all together. So,
you do run into that but it s really nice for doing things for reading this. m going
to open up another document here real quick. We ll open up this is an example of a PDF
that was scanned in so this is recognized as an image and I can show you that by if
we hit Edit, and we go to Find, I m going to type in the word toward, I see that right
on my screen, when I click on it, it tells me it can t find it; that means it s viewing
this as an image. So, none of these other tools are going to be able to read that because
it doesn t see the text there but if we hit snap and read and then we draw a box around
our text and we let it go. [Computer reading] s going to read that out loud to us. Now,
once we re in a word document with this there s two ways that we can use it. We can draw
that box around on our text or we can use the drop down arrow next to it, we can turn
the text selection on and now when we highlight text it s going to pop up a little speaker
and we can hit the speaker [Computer reading] s going to read that to us. So, that is another
way to use it. There are not many options to use, it s very simple, the click and it
s the drag or the highlight and read and that s it. I m going to show you how it works within
an image. Here s a picture I took of a magazine article yesterday. I m going to zoom in on
it a little bit so I can see the text a little bit better. So, this is just an image, this
is from an iPad, I took an image with an iPad and it may actually have been an iPhone, sent
it to myself and now if I click on the TextHelp button here what I should be able to do is
draw a box around some of this text and we should be able to see it or at least be able
to read it pretty well. [Computer reading] Okay, so we saw a couple of things there,
some of the pronunciation might be difficult if we start using things like UDL use an abbreviation
it s going to read it as oodle. We also see here for some reason and I don t know why
it s struggling with the word unable right here, we can see there s a little red squiggly
line here underneath it, that indicates it doesn t think it s going to be able to read
it right and then it just decided not to read it at all by highlighting it in red. So, with
some of these things instead of struggling through with reading garbage it will kind
of block that out completely which can be helpful but at the same time it s going to
skip right over a word and you re going to miss what that word is and you might miss
an important component there by not listening to that but from what we can see here this
is very helpful in that it can read text from an image, it can read text anywhere. It s
also a very inexpensive tool, believe it s only $120.00 for this tool. So, all of it
is the reading but if the other things are going to confuse users and they want this,
it s a very quick and easy thing that allows us to click on and read any text anywhere
and that really could be invaluable for lots of different students. So, that s Don Johnson
s Snap and Read and there s not much in terms of the options here. There are two voices.
You have Heather and Ryan, it lists all these other voices because it does give you access
to other voices you have on your computer so because I have Read and Write Gold we have
access to the TextHelp voices, we have access to the VW voices because of Kurzweil as well
but not everybody s going to have those. The two that come with snap and read are Ryan
and Heather. With this I don t believe it reads in other languages, it s gotta be in
English to be read through here and here you can see this shows us how it highlights text,
ignores text or tells us if it s possibly incorrect in optical character recognition.
We can, I believe, speed this up. This is our slider bar here so if we want it to go
faster we can drag that to go faster or to go slower. There s really not much to this.
It s very simple and very easy to use. It s starting to become popular with lots of
different students who don t want to deal with all that other stuff with some of those
other tools and just want the capability to read like that. Now, what it doesn t have
is we can t pull on a DAISY but we can pull on a DAISY book but we can t use the navigation
system in a DAISY book through this, we can just draw a box around text and have it read
and I guess that drawing the box is the other downside to this. It doesn t read by sentence.
It doesn t read by paragraph. You have to draw a box from the text you want to read
so you kind of decide on your own how much you can handle and you have to draw a box,
redraw it and all that stuff. If it is reading, you can pause it in the middle and start playing
again from that point. So, that s Snap and Read. Again, it s fairly new, and it s one
of my favorite newer technologies that are out there. I want to show you something that
s free now and that can be helpful as well and that s an extension on Google Drive for
Google Chrome for Read and Write Gold. So, you re not from the Google Chrome. Google
Chrome s a web browser. You download this web browser and create a Google account. So,
you create a Google account that gives you an account to Gmail and Google Docs and all
that kind of stuff. If we have a Google Docs account let me get into my Google Docs here.
Just give me one second. We ll go to Google. I m going to open up my drive. It s going
to give me access to documents. So, within Google Docs here, I have my Google documents.
I can open up images. Let me find one to open here. Let s open up my drive, open up things
that I have here. I ll open up this app resource document. To open up this document, and if
you look, once this is ready because I m in Google docs, I get this tab that says read
and write. So, read and write is now we ve got Read and Write Gold which is the reading
tools built in to Google documents through Google Chrome. So, once I go and I want to
read something I can click on where I want to start and then I can go and hit play. [Computer
reading] I can make it stop when I m done with that. So, this is really nice because
it s free. What this is called is an extension to Google Documents within Google Chrome.
So, to use it, you ve gotta have Chrome. You have to have a Google Doc, or Google Drive,
or Google account and then take you to Chrome store and you would download the Read and
Write Gold for Google Docs link and then anytime you open up a Google document, you re going
to get this tab that says read and write top up in there. When you open up the Read and
Write pop up tab, you get play, pause, and stop. You get a couple of other components
from Read and Write Gold built in. Now, with this I don t believe there s much we can do.
Let s go to settings. We can change the speed but these are our speeds: very fast, very
slow, fast, slow, very slow, and medium. There s not much we can do with that. We don t have
a whole ton of options with voices either. There s a few here but not a ton of voice
options. Excuse me. On your continuous reading, if we uncheck that, I believe it s just going
to read the line for us. We don t have a whole lot in terms of options but we do have a few
but it is free and this was really neat that this is a free tool because this allows us
to go through and really read anything that we have in Google docs. Now, the second piece
involved in this with Google Documents is Google Docs actually allows us, if we go over
here, and it says upload. I m going to upload that document that we looked at earlier that
was the inaccessible document example that we looked at with Snap and Read. So, I m going
to go hit upload and I m going to go look for files and now I m going to go to my desktop
and I m going to pull up let s see, let s find a Read and Write Gold example document
here. Here s our Read and Write Gold example. We ll open this. I m going to open up my library
example. This is an inaccessible document. Now, look at this. Well, we ve got set up
in our settings and I ll show you how to do this before ll show you this in just a second.
We can set our preferences so that it converts our documents into Google format and this
is the key right here. Convert text for PDF and image files into Google doc. So, we can
convert text and when I start upload, it s going to go through and it s going to upload
this document. It s actually going to take and convert that into text that we can then
go ahead and listen to with our Read and Write Gold option within the Google Doc. Now, this
is all free and it s fantastic that that option s there for free. Let me show you where we
would change that. If we go to settings under Google document here and we go to upload settings,
we would want to check all of these. So, check convert files to Google docs. Check invert
the text from an uploaded PDF for image file and by doing that we have now taken and if
I open up if I scroll through your find the library example and I open this up let s open
that up. Now, if we look up top again, we re going to get that Read and Write Gold extension
popping up. There it is and now if we scroll through this is the one downside to this.
We start scrolling through. We re going to get let s see so, here s our first page. That
s going to give us the image. We can t do anything with this. If we click on this, it
s showing us that it s a whole image but what it does is it takes then at the very next
page is the text that it recognized from there. So, if I click on the text, there s that toward
I then play [Computer reading] and it ll read that out loud. So, again we can download that
Read and Write tool. It s free. We can load that into our text reader or we can load that
into Chrome. We can take any text and upload it into chrome or into Google docs and we
can read it. Let s try it. I haven t tried it yet so I don t know how well it s going
to work. I m going to upload that image that I have of text and we ll see. It may not work
right because I think it rotated sideways but we ll try it. I m going to upload it in
and see if it s going to work within our Google chrome and have it read out loud. So, you
can see over here it s still finishing what it s doing. We ll let it upload and when it
s all set we ll take a look and give it a try. So, it s complete. Let s take a look
and see if it ll work for us. So, there s our image, it has our image there and it came
up properly, let s scroll down and see the text, there s our text. It broken up a little
differently than I would ve expected but if we click here and we hit our read and write
goal drop down and hit play [Computer reading] ll read that out loud so if you re setting
this up for a student all you d have to do to make this a little bit more accessible
is probably go in here and delete the image and you ll maybe want to take a look at this
and make little changes where you think the recognition could be a little bit better like
here rolling two of the word of ward and winning together we can separate those and it actually
recognized pretty well what this was looking like. So, this is a nice free way to take
text and put it into a digital format and have it read out loud. So, just one more time
I ll just reiterate the way you do this, what you need is you need to download Google Chrome,
you then have to have a Google account so you have Google Drive, Google Docs, you go
to Chrome store and you download the read and write goal log in or extension or whatever
they happen to call it. If you just Google Read and Write Gold for Google Docs, it ll
take you right to it and it ll load it directly into your browser so that anytime you open
the Google Doc or Google Drive, you ll have that read and write tab there that you can
use. Then within Google Drive, it has an upload button. If we have our settings set correctly,
we can upload any text from an image or PDF directly into Google docs and have it read
out loud. So, we ve looked at several apps today. We ve looked at Read and Write Gold
and Kurzweil which were both kind of higher end, more expensive tools to allow you to
read any text. We ve looked at Snap and Read that allows us to read any text but it s only
the reading component and we got a little bit more than we have to do with. ve looked
at Firefly which is a cloud based system for reading text and we ve looked at the Google
Drive and the Read and Write Gold Google extension for Google Docs which is helpful as well.
Within that, again, that s also a cloud based thing. You go into any computer that s got
Google Chrome, you open it up and you sign in, you ll have that Read and Write extension
there on access to any of your Google documents there as well. So, that can be a great help,
a great tool for reading and being able to access things anywhere else as well. I ll
just point out and I talked about each of these in a previous webinar so if you want
to see how these work you can take a look at the webinar on free and inexpensive tools,
look study is a free tool that reads things as well. We have to download them from Barnes
and Noble or open them into Nook Study. It s got a pretty good voice. It s fairly limited
in what it can do. ReadPlease and Natural Reader are two other free ones, again, very
limited in what they can do but they do give you free access to reading text out loud so
again you can see those and how they work in a previous webinar on free and inexpensive
tools but what I wanted to show you was just the just some of those four or five famous
ones we looked at today: Read and Write Gold, Kurzweil, Kurzweil s Firefly, Snap and Read,
and the free tools from Google Chrome. Are there any questions on the things we looked
at today? I guess one other thing that we talked about in the past and you can look
in the book share webinar is there s a free reader a couple of free readers through book
share that allows us to access through book share books that we can have read out loud.
If we don t have questions that s going to do it for today and I ll wrap it up for today.
I hope it was helpful to see some different examples of text readers. If you have questions
after the fact on any of these or would like to come to ICATER to try them out, you re
certainly able to contact me at james-stachowiak@uiowa.edu. Thanks for attending today and we hope that
you keep following us on our weekly app webinars and on March 18, we ll do our next hour long
webinar and it ll kind of be on universal design for learning. I think we ll look at
principles and implementation. So, thanks and have a great day. [End of Audio] Duration:
61 minutes PAGE PAGE 5184_at tools for reading.64k Jim Stachowiak HYPERLINK "http://www.gmrtranscription.com"
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