ictsan

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; 

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.

Textease has a wonderful ‘Click to Speak’ facility. Pupils are able to gain support for their reading from clicking on a word, and hearing it spoken. For most pupils, this is a more useful facility than continuous reading of a piece of marked text. Also, if a pupil is wearing headphones, an adult can be certain that the pupil is carrying out the task.
Bordertalk, Talking Tasks and Well Worth Reading all take advantage of this facility.
On networked computers, you usually have to reset the speech option every time. Here’s a helpsheet that reminds you how to do this.
www.educationict.org.uk/ictsan/docs/textease-click_on_word_to_speak.pdf

Here’s a new document that shows you a slightly different way

Textease – How to use the Speech Tool

There are many ways that Penfriend can be configured; various speech options and settings for the prediction.

I tend to set quite a large font size – about 16 pt. I turn off the speak as you type options and change speak the predictions to speak on right click. When you save the Lexicon, the settings that are in use at the time are saved too.

If a pupil is likely to enter incorrect words into the lexicon, one way is to un-tick ‘Learn new Words’ . Another is to do as I have done; untick Predict new words. Now, at the end of a session you can check the new words in the lexicon and weed out any wrong words. Now, choose Edit -> Approve New Words. They will be accepted as old words and will be predicted.

Here are some tips I’ve devloped after using Penfriend prediction in schools;

1. We want the user’s first experience of prediction to be positive. It really helps improve prediction, especially at the start if you make sure that PF predicts words that the pupil is likely to need. You can even type the text that the pupil needs, before he types it. That way it is bound to work. Another way is to use “learn Clipboard”. Find a text with similar content to what the user will be writing about. The Internet’s the best place. Mark the text ( Ctrl+C); In PF choose View -> Lexion; In Lexicon choose, File -> Learn Clipboard. Now Penfriend is likely to predict the better.
2. Minimise Penfriend when you are; Editing, you are likely to type in half a word; typing in a web address; doing anything other than typing. This will prevent unwanted words getting into the lexicon
3. Un-select the option – Predict new Words. Now you need to work in this way; After each session using Penfriend, the support person weeds out all the mistaken words and approves all the other new words. These become old words and these can be predicted during the next session.
4. Pupils may want to enter words that are predicted by typing them rather than by pressing the function key or clicking the mouse. This is to be encouraged as using a Predictive Typer alone does not make you a good speller. Typing the word can help improve spelling.

Heather is a new synthesised voice from Cereproc. You can listen to her here;
http://www.cereproc.com

The best news is that that the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University have prompted the Scottish Government to licence the Heather voice for use in Scottish schools.

What does this mean?
Any software that can make use of a SAPI 5 voice will be able to speak in Heather’s voice. Clicker and Textease, software used mostly in primary schools, should be able to speak with this voice. It should work with the newly available WordTalk and Penfriend. The CALL Centre are currently testing the voice with these and other pieces of software. Heather should work with ‘Browse Aloud’ software which will read PDF files, including the digital exam papers from the SQA.
Heather should also work with software that turns text into MP3 audio files that pupils can listen to on an MP3 player. These can be low cost or cost free software such as the new version of Wordtalk (beta), or more sophisticated packages like Dolphin Producer that turns MS Word documents into DAISY format talking books.

Will it make a great difference?

It’s hard to tell. Whenever I demonstrate text-to-speech software there is often someone who complains about the quality of the speech. I imagine that they are complaining about the lack of emphasis that human speakers give to important words in a sentence. Text to Speech is not as easy to listen to as speech recorded from a skilful reader. It needs to be recognised that it is a different medium, which requires more concentration from the listener. However the difference in the speed of production is great. It can take about eight hours to produce a good recording of an hour of a person reading a text. If you have the text as a text file on a computer, you can let the computer ‘read’ the text into an audio file while you do something else.

Does the fact that it is Scottish matter? Will this boost the use of text to speech to support pupils in Scottish schools?
Most people say that it does. However I have heard visually impaired people listening to HAL, a fairly old, robotic sounding voice, with the reading speed turned up to a rate that I found very difficult to follow. Perhaps it’s your level of needs that makes you persevere.
It seems odd to me that Professor Stephen Hawking has the voice that sounds like a DECtalk speech synthesiser of the late 1980s, yet people complain about the SAPI 5 voices on modern computers being robotic or American. When we listen to a voice on the radio, we can pick up almost immediately the part of the country the speaker is from and the speaker’s level of education. We tend to react to speakers on class basis. If you need any proof of this, go the the AT&T Natural Voices. You can type in some text and hear them spoken by Charles or Camilla. ( Sorry that should be Audrey.)

http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/

Someone has played a cruel joke on the developers by suggesting that UK users would appreciate having text read out by upper class twits. Do waste some time on this site, creating conversations between these two characters.

Anyway, Heather will, I hope, be available to be installed on computers in Scottish schools, at no additional cost this summer. Then we’ll find out the answer to these questions.

Penfriend is a well used piece of supportive writing software. It has three main features;

1. Predictive Typing
2. On-screen Keyboard
3. A Marked Text Reader

Prediction is potentially a very powerful way of supporting pupils. Originally tis technique was developed to However it does require support from someone lie a teacher, ANA, friend or family member.

Here are several things that can make the use of Penfriend prediction more effective

• Choose the starter Lexicon for the user carefully. There are several available which may be more suitable than the default one “default.lex”
• Try making the user’s first experience succeed by; asking him what he wants to type; typing it in; deleting the text. In this way user is bound to get a positive experience.
• The user has to get the first letters in a word correct. So if he thinks that ‘used’ is spelled ‘yoost’, Penfriend can predict ‘used’, even if he starts typing ‘used’. You need to add these words into the lexicon using the abbreviations options in the Lexicon Window

Make sure that the speech settings, the font size and colour are as you’d want them. If the user is a very poor speller, it might be an idea to turn off “Predict New Words”. In this way you can ‘approve’ new words – turn them into old words, which will be predicted, at the end of the session.

A lexicon only becomes useful to a user when it conactiens the words that he/she is going to need. One way to ensure this is to;

1. Go to a web page of appropriate material
2. Mark some text
3. Copy it to the clipboard – using [Ctrl] and [C]
4. Load up Penfriend and Select View -> Lexicon -> File-> Learn Clipboard.
   This should add all the new words found in the text to the clipboard.

Here are some useful links;

The CALL Centre, Edinburgh University has a document “Using Penfriend – Suggested Settings” that helps you make the best choices in setting up a lexicon; http://callcentre.education.ed.ac.uk/downloads/quickguides/wordprediction/penfriend.pdf

The Penfriend web-site is very useful. It has a list of features of features in Penfriend XP

http://www.penfriend.biz/products/pfxp.shtml

There are some video tutorials here; http://www.assist-it.org.uk/assets/content/penfriend_tutorials.html

In particular, tutorials 3 and 5 are recommended

Two last tips;

• If you are going to type in somethin that you do not want Penfriend to learn – a web address for example – minimise Penfriend – to prevent it learning.
• Sometimes Penfriend gets confused and stops predicting. Press [Enter] a couple of times and it will start predicting. Penfriend works best when text is being entered continuously and cannot cope with the text being edited. Minimise Penfriend when you are editing

Remember the address of this blog is; http://ictsan.edublogs.org

The new set of assistive software; Penfriend and Wordtalk is now available for installation in schools.

The initial explanatory document is here;

Accessibility for CC3 (v1.0)

Penfriend has a website – www.penfriend.biz There are also some very useful video clips demonstrating the use of Penfriend here; http://www.assist-it.org.uk/assets/content/penfriend_tutorials.html

WordTalk is the software that allows a word document to be read back to a user in a variety of ways. It has its own site www.wordtalk.org.uk where you’ll find documentation about its use. It is freely copiable and can be installed at home by pupil’s parents.

For pupils needing a high amount of magnification, Supernova is one solution. It now comes as a pendrive.

The pendrive can be inserted into any Windows XP computer. Some modules are installed and Supernova is available on the computer. With networks it’s all a lot more complicated!

Supernova has a large number of facilities. In reality most users only use six or seven. They use these through the use of shortcuts. It’s sometimes necessary to change the shortcuts – especially if you are using a laptop. Also it is necessary to disable or change a shortcut because it might clash with the shortcut used by MS Word – such as CTRL+A to select all the text in a document.

Actually, this is the hard bit;  disabling the key press combinations to allow the desired shortcuts of MS Word to be available  to the user. The good news, is that you should only ever have to do it once.

Take a backup of the pen. Make extra backups. You can copy the settings to a new pen by doing the following;

Here’s a document showing how we set up the keyboard shortcuts

Hot_Keys-Word+Supernova _Magnification

Sticky Keys is a very simple solution for users who, for whatever reason, are unable to press two keys at a time. In MS Windows, it is usually set through Accessibility Options. It means that they can easily access capital letters by pressing SHIFT THEN K to get a capital “K” , rather than  SHIFT AND K together.

It does not stop there. The keyboard short cuts or keypress combinations, used to control computer functions can be accessed this way. Look at this list for combinations which can be very useful, and easier than using the mouse for someone with motor difficulties.

It is best to choose the option to have the above symbol on the desktop taskbar, so that you can see that it is working. This tell the user that CTRL and SHIFT have been pressed.

The other keys are; ALT and The Windows Key.

A very useful combination is ALT and F4 to close the current window. Much easier than using  a mouse for some users.