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Which is the best OCR software in the world. Which is the most annoying to install on a stand-alone system? The same one, I think.

OCR Software is pretty essential when you are creating accessibile texts for user with disabilities; visually impaired, motor impaired, dyslexic. There will be a document, probably prepared using a computer but the original file has been lost. OCR can help you reconstitute the document.

Four years ago iansys.com were very helpful in doing a comparative review of OCR software available at the time. It was fascinating. It emerged that Abby Fine reader was the best available. However, none of the packages did everything they said they could. The developers ticked their own boxes.  In a particular all the packages failed to recognise correctly texts in European languages which use accents or non standard characters; ß, Ñ, François etc.

Abbyy Fine reader got this right in version 8 and I have stuck with them since. I’d be interested in anyone else’s recent experiences. Is Abbyy in fact still the best?

However, if you want to install it in a stand alone system, be prepared to waste a lot of time. There are on line forms and you can send an email to a server, but these do not work. Only sending  an email to European support brought a helpful answer from a Norwegian support person. You can also run up phone charges to Holland on a support call. As I recall, they speak pretty good English on that helpline too.

The next problem is that you are sent an activation code with 78 characters. Yes, 78. Here is an example of what it might look like! Is this really necessary?

697973-930566-558156-627071-318120-962720-622555-687533-155011-784308-108480-936009-983444

Powertalk is now available for CC3 networks

Powertalk is a very simple utility to use. Once it is is installed, all you have to do is right-click on a Powerpoint presentation. Choose the new option; Narrate with Powerpoint

Powertalk will read the text that appearrs in the slides of the presentation. 

If you load a presentation in the usual way, a double clcik on the file, the presentation will be silent in the usual way.

You can set the voice that Powertalk will use to read the text. What really happens is that the utility -’Speech options’ will set the voice of your choice as the default voice for the user of the computer. This cannot be done in any other way on an RM CC3 network.  Most people will choose to use Heather , the  Scottish Voice, of course, if they have it available. Cereproc Heather has been licensed for use in all Scottish schools. Powertalk is a free utility.

Doorway Speller is very near completion for use in schools. It is an implementation of the well proven method of improving an individual’s personal accuracy in spelling; Look, say, cover,  write and check.

Users can practise the lists of words with Doorway Speller  using the keyboard  an on-screen keyboard.

The lists of words to practise are, on average, about 10-12 words long. There are based an work done by Isabel Middleton, Learning Support teacher at Howdenburn Primary School. The words have been categorised into  five levels; A,  A-B, B, C and D, following the Scottish National Curriculum 5-14.

It is expected that this software will also be available from a website so that pupils can be set spelling homework that they can practise on-line.

For schools in Scottish Borders, to find out more, please send an email to; pwhittaker at scotborders dot gov dot uk

Wordtalk is the excellent utility from Rod MacCaulay of Aberdeen City.  It is available for download from; here; http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/

I have already posted about its excellent text-to-speeech features. In particular I like the option- S: Read the current sentence, which does just that and puts the caret into the next sentence. This means that the user can reflect on that sentence before listening to the next one. It works really well with Heather, the Scottish voice, which has been licensed for all schools in Scotland. Working with youngsters using Heather and Wordtalk together is a real pleasure. This combination is available now for installation on all computers in the authority.

There’s more in store. I have been testing a new beta version (4.0) of Wordtalk. There are two new icons. One loads the previously saved settings.  In this way, you’ll be able to use Heather as the voice each time just by clciking the load saved settings icon. Even more compelling is the “save as audio file” option. Mark some text, click on this icon and you’ll create a .wav or a .mp3 file of Heather (of course) reading a worksheet, short story or whatever.  Youngster can use an mp3 player to keep these audio files and listen  when they want.

The new Wordtalk also has a feature that allows user to listen to a single word, by clicking on it. This is very similar to the single click-to-speak-a-word feature found in Textease and Clicker.  Hoping that it will not be long before Wordtalk 4.0 is released.

For a picture of Rod receiving a Microsoft Innovative Teacher Award – see here

Inclusive Technology, among the largest suppliers of additional needs software and equipment in UK education, has opened a new website with free activities suitable for pupils with access difficulties; HelpKidzLearn

You’ll find;

• a range of games from “press to see what happens”, to game of skill
• text-free stories which move on with a press or a click
• creative play activities – drag and drop to build up pictures, or click to colour in
• find out activities-how to make biscuits etc – using a photo-story – rather like a powerpoint presentation

More – there is more if you look on this site.

A fair number of the activities are accessible to switch users, although from this supplier, it would have been better if they all were. Most are suitable for touch screen and Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) users.

The software on this site is fully working. There is a similarity between some of the activities and some commercial software from Inclusive Technology. These are mentioned on the site.  So perhaps it’s a very careful piece of advertising. Or perhaps Inclusive T are dipping the toe into the big pond of delivering software on-line. Whatever it is, thanks Inclusive. We can even forgive the ‘z’ in the name – well almost.

Tar Heel Reader is indeed a remarkable development. I’ve now given it a try and have created  a book about cats. It ’s very easy to do. It has to be the easiest way to make a  talking book.

It’s here; http://tarheelreader.org/2008/09/08/cats-can/
There are a few things to note;

• You need to register before you can make your own books, so give yourself some time to do this and receive the activation key
• You can create books and save them as drafts. These will not appear on the Tar Heel Reader site until you publish them.
• When you save a book, it might not be evident that it has been saved. It almost certainly has. To continue editing, use the book or publish it, go to ;” Books you wrote”

There seems to be an intermittent fault, as I was not able to create a Powerpoint presentation from it this time, but it worked perfectly in the web based version.
The save to Powerpoint, Open Office and Flash .swf options seem to be working well now. This is by far the easisest way to make simple presentations.

I am still bemused by this name for the people of North Carolina.  There is even a talking book about it; http://tarheelreader.org/2008/09/04/tar-heels/

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/

If you have created an accessible version of a book under copyright, the book should contain a copyright notice. Here’s the one we use;

Copyright Notice.

This book was first published by …………..  in …………. The copyright is held by ………….. …………..

This Large Print Book has been prepared within  <name of your authority>  Education Dept, under the “Copyright (Visually Impaired Persons) Act 2002 ”

It is for use only by persons defined under that act;

“Visually impaired person” means a person—

(a) who is blind;

(b) who has an impairment of visual function which cannot be improved, by the use of corrective lenses, to a level that would normally be acceptable for reading without a special level or kind of light;

(c) who is unable, through physical disability, to hold or manipulate a book; or

(d) who is unable, through physical disability, to focus or move his eyes to the extent that would normally be acceptable for reading.

The legislation can be found here;

Microsoft Word’s document format; .doc seems to be something a standard in the creating of accessible documents – large print books, DAISY Books and books in MS Reader format. I have just made a large print books of “The Great Gatsby” for a pupil and here’s how I did it.

I visited wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org and entered the title of book. At the bottom of the page there was a reference to Gutenbery Project Australia, where I could view the whole text. I went for the text version.

Tip 1 – I press CTRL + A the CTRL + C to copy the text onto the clipboard. Then I load up MS Word. In my new document. I do not just paste the text, I use Paste Special and paste just plain text. Any graphics caught up the selection just get stripped out before the text is pasted into your document. Usually if you copy and paste froma webpage, Word copies the underlying html web code as well!

Tip 2 - Make sure that you have continuous text, not text with a line freed (LF) or carriage return (CR) at the end of a line. You can check by clicking on the show/hide paragraph symbol tool. It’s a backwards P. If this shows you a paragraph symbol at the end of each line, then you need to get rid of them – unless this work is in verse format. You need to know that the paragraph symbol is represented within Word by “^p” (caret, lower case p). So you could  search for “^p” and replace it with a space. Except then you’d have no paragraphs at all! So I replace two paragraphs (”^p^p”) with an unusual symbol say “~” tilde. I then replace the remaining single paragraphs with a space. I reinstate the tildes (”~”) with two paragraphs – “^p^p”. This is long winded but it works. If there is an easier way I’d love to know.

Tip 3 If you are making a large print book control the margins by going to the menu; File-> Page Setup-> Margins.
Reduce the upper and lover margins to as little as .5 cm and the left and right ones to 1.5 cm or less if your method of binding can take it. You should reduce the number of pages in the book quite substantially

Tip 4 Use Styles for the fonts; Choose your font size for this work. Do not, however mark the whole text and then change the font size in the menu at the top of the screen. This is a big mistake and nearly eveyone does it it because so few people have been shown how to use styles.

You need to use the Format -> Styles and Formatting tool. This appears at the right of your document. If you have pasted in plain text, then you should see just a few styles there including; Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2. You need to click on Normal – the style for the main body of the text and Modify the style. Change its format; change font size to say 20 pt Tahoma.

Now Modify the style – Heading 2 to say Arial Bold 20 pt. Modify Heading 1 to, say, Arial Bold 24pt

Find each chapter heading, click in the text – Chapter 1- and click on the style at the right; Heading 2.  You can find each occurence of the word chapter – usually at the start of a chapter and make sure that it is set to Heading 2.

Set the Title of the book to Heading 1.

If you use styles like this, you can easily change the whole of the body text size for a pupil who requires a larger size, by going back and Modifying the font size. There is another advantage. It is very easy to create an index called a table of contents. I’m running out of time to explain this, but here’s a clue.

Tip 5 After setting the section and chaper headings – using Headings 1, 2 and 3, use the menu item; insert-> Reference-> Index and tables…..> Table of contents. It usally enough to click on OK and you have an Index! If you change the font size or other formatting, this index will be out of date and you’ll have to renew it.

If you want to create an e-book to be read by a  person with access difficulties using MS Reader, you have done most of the hard work already.

This is how I do it and I think that using thiese methods will save time in the future if the docu,mets need to be used by other pupils in a slightly differnt format. If I have made any errors, please let me know.

Tip 6 Oh, do not forget to add your copyright notice to the new accessible book – more on this in a later post

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”