Free Assistive Reading Tools

I've been working with a special education teacher today trying to find some solutions for some of his students with reading disabilities and vision impairments. Mostly, looking to find ways to do both text to speech and speech to text.

As far as I can tell, there are only two real viable options for speech to text: the speech recognition tool that comes free with Windows 7 or Dragon Dictation which for the PC or Mac is still relatively expensive but for the iPhone or iPod Touch is free. (for a real good description of this visit Ira Socol's post, Writing without the Blocks).

As for text to speech, there are plenty of tools out there that will convert movable type to a spoken word mp3 file:

• - convert text to speech
• - convert text to speech (spoken by a cartoon avatar)
• vozMe - convert text to speech
• - convert text to speech

or to a more multimedia output:

• - If you can type, you can make movies. Text-to-Movie
• - text-to-speech talking avatar generator
• - Oddcast makes fun and interesting multimedia generator widgets. One of which is the Etrade talking babies widget.

These are all great, but they require two things:

1. That the student have access to an electronic typed version of what they need read to them, and
2. That the student have access to a computer in class.

Problem is, what the student needs read to them looks more like this:


than this:


The solution we came up with was the use of free optical scan tools like:

• - Free online tool that converts text from image files or PDFs to movable text in a DOC, PDF, RTF, or TXT file.
• - Free online tool that converts text from a picture file to text that can be copied and pasted.

First we take the pages of the student's textbook and scan them into a PDF file on our copy machine:
Then upload those files to one of the free OCR tools listed above to convert it to text. Then we take that text and convert it to an mp3 file using text to speech. From there, we can load the files onto an MP3 player that the student can use.
But, if we want to take this a step further, we could create QR codes for the audio files we created that the student could access with their own mobile device. We simply paste a small version of the code on the page that is read in the file. To do this we could use any of the following free tools:

• - QR Code reader
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator

I wonder how long it will be before textbook companies will offer this accommodation themselves. Wouldn't it be great if a real book could be an auidobook?

Literacy 2.0

I had an idea yesterday that sprung into my head yesterday that has gotten me a little excited and I thought I would share it here today. A couple of weeks ago I came across the LibriVox website. LibriVox is a website/group attempting to make audio recordings of every book in the public domain. Anyone can volunteer to be a reader. All you have to do is record yourself reading a chapter of a book then upload it to their site. Books get collected into a podcast stream and then archived.


My first thought was that this could be a fantastic project for students. Students could be assigned to read chapters of books in the public domain and upload their recordings to LibriVox. This project would both promote literacy and community service since the students would ultimately be contributing to the greater good by contributing to this free directory.

This website got me thinking about projects like Project Gutenberg which are attempting to digitize every book in the public domain and sites like the Internet Archive who are trying to make all public domain content available free for anyone, not to mention Google's initiative to digitize everything else including books and periodicals or the success of Wikipedia. I live, work, and breath internet technology as a major part of my career but this continually amazes me. Just ten years ago I was in college and had to spend countless hours in the university library so I could have access to all the information that now fits in the palm of my hand.

The media center in the school where I work has a little under 2,000 books that students can read. On my iPod I have access to over 30,000 books just with Project Gutenberg alone. Why wouldn't every school want to have one of these? Why wouldn't every parent want each of their children to have one?






For the iPod touch there are two free apps particularly worthy of special note here: Stanza and Audiobooks. Stanza is a free book reader. From Stanza you can access an online catalog where you can download and read books from numerous sources both free and paid. Audiobooks gives you a direct link to the books in LibriVox's collection.


Now, when I was in high school my AP English teacher would assign us each week to go to the local college library and do research. This was great for students who lived within walking distance of a college library. However, thousands of students across our nation don't live anywhere near a library of that size or quality including students at the schools where I currently work. My thought is, a foundation could be established to provide isolated rural schools with labs of iPod Touches or labs of netbooks for use as a library resource that could be checked out like a book. In exchange for the lab, schools would commit to having students contribute to LibriVox via the project I described at the beginning of this post. This would promote literacy, grow the public archive of free public domain audiobooks, help bridge the digital divide, and bring tens of thousands of ebooks to libraries with otherwise limited resources.