ictsan

Tar Heel Reader is a really wonderful development. There is a bank of talking books on-line. The ‘pages’ can be turned by pressing a the space bar, or using a switch.  You can use pictures from Flikr, the on-line repository of millions of photos, and type in your own sentences. The books are kept on line. This is the best place for them.

You can even download them as Powerpoint presentations, Open Office presentations or Flash files (.swf). The downloaded presentation will not have the text spoken.

I had a few problems with some pictures not loading from Flickr, while using a networked computer in schools. There is an acknowledged problem and this is being addressed by the creation of a new way of storing images on-line.

This development has been brought to us by a collaboration between  the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the department of Computer Science  at the University of North Carolina. The odd name name is taken from a nickname for the area, apparently

Give it a try; http://gb-cs.cs.unc.edu/TarHeelReader/

This entry was posted on September 3, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Accessibility, Internet, Learning Materials, Text to Speech Output. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.