Text to Speech - The various facilities it offers to learners.
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.
