Braille Has Arrived!

Hooray! For the first time ever, we have Braille production capabilities on the SOU campus!

This summer, we purchased an Index Basic-D Braille embosser. As printers go, it’s really a beautifully engineered piece of equipment; quite sleek and impressive. Once we added Duxbury 10.6, an astoundingly quick text-to-Braille translator, we were off and running!

Literally, actually, as I quite amused the rest of the office by dancing around with the syllabus I’d produced, chanting, “I maa-ade Braille. I maa-ade Braille.” Truly, this is a big step forward for SOU, as previously we had to send all of our Braille needs elsewhere to produce.

Not only can we produce Braille documents, but we can also create certain types of tactile graphics. At this time, we’re limited to fairly simple picture graphics, but can do some pretty nifty graphs and charts. If you’re interested, drop me a line!

SayIt Review & Alternate Text Options (part 2)

I downloaded the trial version of SayIt and played with it quite a bit. What follows is my personal review - your experience may vary!

On the plus side, it does read text aloud, it is very inexpensive, and it’s one of very, very few Palm text-to-speech applications. For those who are looking for an equivalent experience to even inexpensive text-to-speech applications (such as Natural Reader, Universal Reader, or Apple’s VoiceOver), you are bound to be disappointed. Essentially, SayIt copies text to a Memo-like application, then reads it aloud. You cannot specifically select which text (say, a paragraph from a four-page document) to copy - it will copy all of the available text in the open document. There were no navigation tools to start or end a specific point or repeat a section without repeating the entire document from the beginning. The voice is clunky and slow, with no ability to change speed or pitch. For most assistive technology users, this product probably won’t fit your needs. The good news is that at least it’s out there! Perhaps future versions will contain the features we need to make SayIt a viable option for AT users.

As promised in the Spotlight on Alternate-Format Text, let’s take a look at the options that SOU’s alternate-format text users have for receiving their texts. In the earlier blog, we looked at the many format choices alt text users have: electronic text accessed through a variety of programs, MP3s. Again, all of these have advantages and disadvantages. In addition to these choices, the way the alt text gets to you can also take many forms.

• The most popular output choice tends to be CDs. They are easily portable and not so small that they get lost in the bottom of a backpack too often. With electronic text, we can put each book on a separate CD, or we can often put several together on one CD. MP3s usually take several CDs per book, depending on the speed of the reading voice. CDs do need to be returned to DSS by the last day of the quarter in which they are checked out.
• We can set up a way for you to download your book files over the internet through an ftp site called YouSendIt. This is a free site. When files are ready, we compress them in a .zip file and upload them to YouSendIt. YouSendIt then sends the student an email, saying the files are ready for download and giving them a specific address to go to to do so. For students with a fast internet connection, this can be a quick and easy way to get your alt text, with no CDs to return. (Students will instead be responsible for deleting these files from computers or any storage devices at the end of the quarter.)
• Students can bring in a flash drive (also called jump drives, USB drives, or memory sticks) and we can download alt text directly to these. Flash drives are incredibly portable and have recently become very cost-effective ways of transporting fairly large amounts of data.
• We can download MP3 files directly to a student’s iPod or other MP3 player. Some MP3 players also have speed controls for audiobooks - thus handling one of the downsides to receiving books in MP3 format.
• Some alt text books can be sent by email as well. Generally, these are shorter, no-graphics type books that we can compress in .zip format and still fit in an email. Email is not recommended for students who are using a dialup connection, as files can be large enough to cause long download times. We email only to students.sou.edu addresses and will not use other, personal email accounts. Please note that if you are forwarding your SOU email to another account, the size restrictions that account has may limit your ability to receive alt text files in this way.