New Function in an Already Fabulous Suite

Summary Tool

Ever wanted to skim an electronic document, without having to page through it? Now you can. Using the Premier Assistive Technology tools available on campus (Etext Reader, Universal Reader, Talking Word Processor), you can create a summary of the document with just two clicks. You can choose a percentage (default is 10%) of the document, or a specified number of sentences, and the program will extract a summary for you.

Benefits

• Finally, a way for people with visual impairments to skim a document!
• Get an idea of the content and style of the document before reading - a great preview or review method for studying.
• Use with the Talking Word Processor to summarize your own work; a good check to see if your structure is making logical sense.

Downsides

• Quality of summary varies greatly by author’s style and structure. This is, after all, and automatically generated summary, not one directed by human intelligence.
• Encourages the temptation to skim required reading only - not really read it. Use this as a study tool, not a substitute for real reading!!!

If you have questions about this or other assistive technology tools, use the comment field!

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!