Ghotit

There are various misconceptions about spellcheckers. This article aims to clarify some important points.

Almost all wordprocessors, computer software or hardware notetakers, have a spellchecker, however there is a great variety in quality betweeen the best and the worst. This is rarely recognised. The Study carried out by CALL Scotland in 1999 called - Supportive Writing Technology included the only comparative study of spellcheckers. It is still valid. Unfortunately some of the best have disappeared from the market - The Apple Emate for example. Many of the poorest have not got any better. The Alphasmart series of Note takers still have a poor spellchecker.  Microsoft Word is still a decent spellchecker but not the best. The very good Franklin Elementary Spellmaster has been discontinued. However its alogorhythm has been incorporated into  the Write Out Loud talking word processor. very good, but still has some weaknesses.

Very few people are aware of these great differences. The CALL Scotland results can be viewed in the on-line document; http://callcentre.education.ed.ac.uk/downloads/swbook/swbook12-15.pdf

I have investigated  the spellcheckers in word processing software aimed at pupils with spoelling difficuluties. In some cases,  they have proved to less effective at identifying the intended word than MS Word. I feel that producers of these packages are being rather cynical.

It would be really good to have a basic word processing package with good spellchecker  running under Linux. This could be very useful if installed on the new range of Asus EePC/RM Minibooks. The spellchecker in the open-source Open Office is poor compared with MS Word.

So it all bad news then?  Not a lot has happened since the CALL SCotland report in 1999? Well, yes.  However yesterday I received an email from CALL Scotland about Ghotit;

This on-line spellchecker seems to very good. I hope that CALL Scotland will do a comparative review of Ghotit using the same  set of misspelt words that they used in the 1999 study. In the meantime you can judge it for yourself;   http://www.ghotit.com/

This new development really cheered me up. There is someone who cares about the quality of spellcheckers and recognises that dyslexics can benefit much more from a good quality spellchecker. It is not clear, from the website, where this devlopment is leading. I hope to a simple text editor with built in qulaity spellchecker - for Linux, Mac and PC.  Even a web only version would be very welcome.

I hope to find out soon. Watch this space.

Producing accessible versions of novels to be used by V.I. pupils who need large print or disabled pupils who cannot turn the the pages, is a task that many support staff are involved in. Where a classic text is needed, it can usually be found at the project Gutenberg; http://www.gutenberg.org/

Librivox is a project that aims to make all out of copyright works available as audio books. The readers are volunteers. The quality can vary from near professional to a little hard to follow. Some books have a single reader while others have readers taking several chapters each.

I have listened with pleasure to; the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle; the frontier novels of Jack London; the witty anecdotes of P.G. Woodhouse and the science fiction novels of H.G. Wells. These are all on my personal mp3 player. A pupil with significant visual difficulties needs to read “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells over the summer. What luck, it’s there at Librivox waiting to de downloaded. http://www.librivox.org

The quality of the reading is excellent. You could not wish for a better reader. He makes a couple of slips, but nothing annoying. If you want to try Librivox, start with this science fiction classic. The other early master of the genre, Jules Verne, is well represented. Some of his books are available in French, e.g. “Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Le”

An important Announcement in the Scottish Parliament 

On May 18th 2008 Adam Ingram , the Minister for Children and Early Years, made this statement in the Scottish Parliament;

• “One of the biggest stumbling blocks in our schools is related to copyright legislation. Until April 2008, the schools copyright licence allowed materials to be adapted only for those with visual or physical impairment. From April, the Copyright Licensing Agency agreed to extend the licence to cover those who are visually impaired or otherwise disabled, which is a much wider definition. That notable achievement for the group will benefit a large number of pupils with a range of needs, including those with dyslexia.”

This is a major step forward that has been long been  advocated by the “Books for All” project. In effect this mweans that staff supporting dyslexics and other print disabled pupils can adapt a book into an accessible for - such as  using it with text to speech in WordTalk - without the need to request the permission of the copyright holder.

To read the whole debate click here; 

The usual model of use for prediction is for users to have a personal lexicon that grows as they use it. The software bases its predictions on the start of what the user has typed so far in the word, but also on the words the user has already used, the number of times the words have been used, and how recently used.

Supporting the needs of such a user can be rather time consuming. For pupils who may not be long time users of prediction, it may be better to create a class lexicon or topic lexicons. It is important, using Penfriend, which usually saves a lexicon at the end of a session, that the teacher turns off this option in the ‘advanced options’ menu.

The lexicon is best  place for this lexicon is to put it in a shared area of the network where pupils have read but not write access to the lexicon. The teacher can add words in a variety of ways while being sure that pupils cannot accidentally get rid of the lexicon.

It has been clear for a while that mp3 players would be excellent devices for the visually impaired. However, many have very small displays that make them unusable by VI users. This new device is a lot more than just an mp3 player. However it is most notable for being on of the few devices of its kind with voice output to allow navigation. It has no screen and all the commands are entered via key presses. The results are heard as spoken prompts.

This is a a very impressive solution in the school setting, to the problem of delivering learning materials in audio format to pupils in a portable format. Its size is just larger than a large mp3 player or mobile phone.

It can read out text or play files in a variety of formats;

• Talking Books - These are DAISY books, which usually have audio recording of text.
• Other Books - These are mp3 files. a series of files in a folder are treated as a book of sequential sections or chapters. This would be the folder to put a text book that had been turned into audio using a voice such as Heather - see previous post.
• Textfiles - plain .txt files and webpages can be stored here, to be read out by the internal voice of the Stream
• Music - Your music mp3s go here
• Notes - You can record voice notes, or lectures using the internal mike or an external one. They are stored here.

The Stream uses standard SD cards as a storage medium. These are cheap and the contents can easily be backed up onto a spare SD card.

Generally the means of navigation has been well thought out. There are faults. The folder structure of the text files “Bookshelf” is not reflected in the navigation system. This has been pointed out to the developers and it is believed that an improvement will be implemented soon. Fortunately, upgrades are made available at no cost from the developer’s website.

The internal voice which reads the static commands is excellent. However the voice that read the filenames and the text files themselves is not as clear and requires greater concentration. A UK voice is available from the website, but it is not recommended that users upgrade to this unless a new clearer version becomes available

One last gripe; It is hard to get to grips with a whole new operating system on a device with no screen. Sighted people are not used to it. the documentation does not really live up to the ideal of providing “What you need to know in the order you need it”

At last a really good implementation of MP3 player technology well designed for VI users. Also specialist technology for VI users that is not very expensive. Early adopters are not penalised as upgrades are free and simple to effect.

A word of advice if you are supporting a young user of the Steam. Take it home for a week and use it as your Mp3 player, means of accessing podcasts and listening to blogs. It works!

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Thanks to the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University, I have been able to use the newly licensed Scottish voice Heather. I have used it to create audio versions of text files. These have been prepared for a VI pupil who will listening to them using a Victor Reader Stream which will be the subject of a blog very soon, I hope.

Heather really is one of the clearest synthesised voices I have heard on a computer. She is a SAPI 5 voice and I have used the voice very well using Penfriend V 3.1 and Wordtalk, the free text to speech utility for MS Word. I also used a trial version of Wordtalk (v4.0) which turns marked text into a .wav or .mp3 audio file.

Here is a file of a short text that I made using WordTalk (4.0) I think sounds as good or better than any text to speech I have heard. - Wax in a candle. I improved the clarity by putting commas into longer sentences.

The text is taken from here http://wwr.wikispaces.com/Materials

Of course, the great thing is that the voice is definitely Scottish. She can manage Scottish place names rather well. Send me some text for Heather to roll her tongue round. Paste it into a comment!

This event organised by the CALL Centre Edinburgh, University is the annual event in Scotland to meet practitioners and suppliers in the field of ICT and additional needs. Click here for more details. It is held in three venues every year during one week in the Spring. This year the CALL Centre was not a venue and West Lothian Council hosted the SE Scotland day.

The sessions I learnt most from were;

CALL Seminar- An update on the Accessible Digital Exam Paper story, Stuart Aitken gave a very clear presentation. I’d like to study the figures in the Powerpoint presentation. Please can you put the ppt presentation up on the website.

The real costs of using readers and scribes against those of using the digital equivalenst were another compelling argument for using this method for some pupils to complete SQA exams in this way. See the site

Seminar 1- Primary Steps Phonics -

Using the software Primary Steps Phonics from Rambasoft.com - with the Dance Mat as an input device. You had to try it and I did!

Seminar 2 - Using the Nintendo Wii in the classroom - Using the Wii with learning suipport groups in a high school to form group cohesion and reward good learning behaviours.

Seminar 5 - Creating Accessible and Accesible eLearning Content - by Craig Mill, from JISC Regional support centre. Craig is the guru of low cost and free assistive software. He showed us the site: PortableApps.com which houses a whole suite of free software that runs from a memory stick.

Then he demonstrated several sites which offer free text-to-speech- creating an audio file in mp3 or wav format. There is a list here; www.dancewithshadows.com/tech/text-to-speech.asp

I’ll need to make time to start looking through them.

There is an all purpose on-line media converter which means you do not need converter software - such as PDF writers - installed on you computer. Also, it seems to convert almost any audio format into any other!

The Exhibition This had all the usual suppliers - see the list here. One I had not seen before was Discovery Educational Software from Angus. They had some nice software for teaaching basic English vocabulary to EAL pupils.

Thanks to the CALL Centre staff for organising this event, Laura Compton and Margo Kerr and their colleagues for great demonstrations. Thanks to West Lothian Council for hosting the event. Thanks for the lunch too.

Until recently Text to Speech has been available in software that has its origin in the education field - Clicker, Textease and Penfriend in particular. With the arrival of Wordtalk, Text to speech can be used with MS Word the most commonly used word processor in business. So what is the difference in the way text to speech is implemented in these different word processing/publishing packages?

Textease

• The strength of Textease is the “Click on a Word to Speak” option that is very powerful. It is most useful for pupils who are developing literacy through the use of materials such as those of “Well Worth Reading“. Pupils click on each word to hear it spoken. There is also the advantage that a teacher can see a pupil “listening” even if he/she is wearing headphones.
• Textease offers continuous reading too. Textease highlights the word being spoken, in both of the modes. This is a better form of highlighting than the reverse video (black is white) used by Wordtalk.

WordTalk

• This is a free add-on for MS Word so it is highly recommended for home use
• It has a very useful feature on the toolbar; “S for speak Sentence”. This feature speaks the sentence that has the cursor in it and puts the cursor into the next sentence. So a user can listen to continuous text, but with longer gaps between the sentences, allowing the meaning to sink in.
• WordTalk has a talking spell-checker, reading out the suggestions made by Word’s spell-checking

Unfortunately, in the current version of the software, Wordtalks settings - speed, volume, etc. do not survive a re-set of the computer and need to be set each time.

Penfriend

Penfriend’s text to speech has very useful features too;

• Read Clipboard; If you can mark and copy text to the clipboard, Penfriend will display the text and read it. This is the easiest way to have part of a web-page read to you.
• Penfriend has both continuous text and “Click on a Word to Speak”. This latter allows the user to click just the words he/she is having difficulty with.
• The means of showing the word being spoken is a different coloured background to the word, giving the effect of a highlighter sliding along behind the words. This is the best of all three methods discussed here as it does not visually distort the actual word.

The Advisory Unit has created a site The Whiteboard Room giving details of materials that can be used with an Interactive Whiteboard, touch monitor or, of course, a mouse. They are mostly suitable for young learners and those with Additional Needs. All the materials have been created by practitioners, and are usable without cost

They are in a variety of formats - Powerpoint, Smart Notebook, and some programs which need to be installed on a computer. There are also web links to software that runs directly from a website- usually Flash programs.

The categories are; Maths, English, Science, Geography, History, RE, PMLD, Art and Design, Design and Technology, ICT

You’ll find the materials there from Graeme Bruce at TASSCC in Aberdeenshire, which can easily match commercial software. These are programs that need to be installed.

There have been some problems with the installation of Penfriend on some networks. Here’s how to check it.

• Open RM Explorer 2 and Click on the Accessibility Tab
• Click on the Penfriend icon
• If this user has not made any use of Penfriend before, Penfriend should load up, showing briefly a note reminding you to save the current Lexicon
• Save the lexicon, you’ll find it saved as “My Penfriend Lexicon” in the users “My Documents” folder.

Great, Penfriend is working well!

If anything else happens; a message saying that permission have not been set for you to poerform the operation, please conact the network admin team by sending in a QSM call.