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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

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

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”

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.

It’s hard to know which is the best format to prepare electronic books for the motor impaired. The CALL Centre suggests that a very useful way is to use Microsoft Reader, to allow the user to turn the on-screen pages.

The reader software is available from here; http://www.microsoft.com/reader/downloads/default.mspx

To prepare a book, you need a utility that works in MS Word. It seems to be called “Read in Microsoft Reader”. You can download it from here; http://www.microsoft.com/reader/developers/downloads/rmr.mspx

You turn the pages by pressing Page up and page Down

Advantages seem to be;

• All the software is free
• You can easily set up a table of contents in MS Word. This converts to a TOC for the e-book.
• The software remembers where you left off reading. When you reload MS reader you are back in the same book at the same place.
• It has alot of keyboard shortcuts

Disadvantages seem to be;

• It does not seem to allow complete access to a keyboard user. A switch user could only access the page up and down features.
• It is for Windows only.
• There seems to be some doubt whether the book creation utility works in the latest version of MS Word.

The Books for All Project

Copyright is the main issue with regard to supporting text impaired youngsters.

There is no point in rehearsing the whole issue here. It is well covered by the site http://www.books4all.org.uk/
This site is maintained by the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University.

If you are producing alternative format books for any pupil you need to state the copyright position near the start of this alternative version.

Here’s what I write;

“This electronic copy of the original work has been made under the exemption in the Copyright (Visually Impaired Persons) Act 2002.
This applies to people;
- who are visually impaired
- who are unable, through physical disability, to hold or manipulate a book
-who have a physical difficulty focusing or tracking.

Except as permitted by law, it may not be further copied, nor may it be
supplied to any other person, without permission.”