Great New Text to Speech for Mac!

Mac users, rejoice! If you’ve ever had the hankering to create your own audiobooks, you can now do it quickly and inexpensively, with some of the best synthetic voices around.

Enter TextParrot, the new text to speech application from AssistiveWare. Not only will it read most electronic documents aloud, with one click it exports your document as an audio track in iTunes. Quickly, too - I processed a 30 page chapter of a textbook in less than 4 minutes. The available voices (3 to choose from in the basic version) from Acapela Group are quite clear and understandable. Even better, it’s affordable! At only $39.95 for a single-language, single-user license, it’s a deal you almost can’t afford to miss. To be truly amazed, check out the prices on the household pack or the multiple languages.

If you read slowly, learn auditorily, prefer to use more than one sense while you read, or have visual or visual processing disabilities, this is definitely a piece of software to check out.

Unexpected Things

As I sit here in the airport, I’m thinking about all those times when things don’t go as we expect. For example, I awoke at 3:45 this morning, expecting to leave from the Medford airport at 5:50 and arrive in Denver for the Accessing Higher Ground conference at 2:37 this afternoon. Instead, here I am in Eugene at 2:45, hoping that this flight will go as planned and I will indeed end up in Denver at 9 ish this evening.

When things don’t go as expected, do you have a way to handle it? What about when your technology doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, or if it fails? Do you know what to do if you get a virus? Having a backup plan is always a good idea. Here’s my top 3 recommendations to prepare for those times when things don’t go as expected…

1. Backup, backup, backup! If you are storing all your documents on your network F: drive, then this is happening for you automatically. But what about at home? Do you have old files backed up somewhere? Or are they all just sitting on your hard drive, waiting for a virus? There are a number of good backup programs out there. Get yourself some rewritable CDs and make backup copies of your documents. Assistive technology users should also make backups of their program preferences - face it, do you really want to have to train Dragon again or go through all those settings on JAWS again? Save preference files and keep a copy with your application CDs.
2. Know where you put your application CDs, and keep any licence key numbers with them. Keeping all these things in one spot will make locating them easier should something go wrong and you need to re-install the application. If you downloaded a program from the internet rather than receiving a CD for it, it’s an excellent idea to make a backup copy of the installation software on a CD.
3. Keep technical support contact information somewhere that you can find it. It’s really irritating to know that the support contact info you need is on the internet somewhere, but you can’t get to it because your computer won’t get to the internet.

If You Want New Tools...

If you think that this blog has had an unreasonable focus on alternate format texts, there is a reason. The number of alternate text requests for this fall has been just unbelievable, and so my mind has been very much upon the world of creating audio, etext, and Braille versions of textbooks and other readings. So far, we’ve had over 60 requests for individual texts. Compare that to last fall’s 27, and you begin to see why I’m a bit consumed! (And thus why blogging has taken a bit of a back seat in the last few weeks.)

So the academic year is underway. Indeed, we’re almost facing midterms already! (Don’t you just love the quarter system and how fast it moves?!) Wondering what tools SOU might have to help you through the year? Wonder no more. We have a series of trainings that explains the many software and hardware adaptations we have available on campus. For more information about the tools we have, check out the AT Home page. For information about the training series, check out our Learning Opportunities page.
If you missed one that you really wanted information about, keep checking - we will be running this series again.

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.