Ghotit spellchecker has improved a great deal since  I last looked at it, and wrote about it in this blog. Also I have learnt more about how it works. It does not work on a word by word basis but work as on continuous text. It is rare in that it can suggest when you have made a real word error. Here’s a sentence with three real word errors;

“John is not here. Can I tack his plays in the really tem?”

Ghotit is able to suggest the correct word. Real word errors can be as many as 20% of the errors that a dyslexic can make, though 10-15% is more usual. It can suggest the correct word when a confusable is used.

I was asked by Jane and Michael to go to there party.

How many spellcheckers do you know that can do that?

As well as the method of comparing the typed text with a mass of existing texts, Ghotit is gaining great deal of awareness of the phonetic errors that some poor spellers make. try this sentence in your spellchecker and then use Ghotit.

I yoost to liyk gong to the sinma.

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

Ghotit

There are various misconceptions about spellcheckers. This article aims to clarify some important points.

Almost all wordprocessors, computer software or hardware notetakers, have a spellchecker, however there is a great variety in quality betweeen the best and the worst. This is rarely recognised. The Study carried out by CALL Scotland in 1999 called – Supportive Writing Technology included the only comparative study of spellcheckers. It is still valid. Unfortunately some of the best have disappeared from the market – The Apple Emate for example. Many of the poorest have not got any better. The Alphasmart series of Note takers still have a poor spellchecker.  Microsoft Word is still a decent spellchecker but not the best. The very good Franklin Elementary Spellmaster has been discontinued. However its alogorhythm has been incorporated into  the Write Out Loud talking word processor. very good, but still has some weaknesses.

Very few people are aware of these great differences. The CALL Scotland results can be viewed in the on-line document; http://callcentre.education.ed.ac.uk/downloads/swbook/swbook12-15.pdf

I have investigated  the spellcheckers in word processing software aimed at pupils with spoelling difficuluties. In some cases,  they have proved to less effective at identifying the intended word than MS Word. I feel that producers of these packages are being rather cynical.

It would be really good to have a basic word processing package with good spellchecker  running under Linux. This could be very useful if installed on the new range of Asus EePC/RM Minibooks. The spellchecker in the open-source Open Office is poor compared with MS Word.

So it all bad news then?  Not a lot has happened since the CALL SCotland report in 1999? Well, yes.  However yesterday I received an email from CALL Scotland about Ghotit;

This on-line spellchecker seems to very good. I hope that CALL Scotland will do a comparative review of Ghotit using the same  set of misspelt words that they used in the 1999 study. In the meantime you can judge it for yourself;   http://www.ghotit.com/

This new development really cheered me up. There is someone who cares about the quality of spellcheckers and recognises that dyslexics can benefit much more from a good quality spellchecker. It is not clear, from the website, where this devlopment is leading. I hope to a simple text editor with built in qulaity spellchecker – for Linux, Mac and PC.  Even a web only version would be very welcome.

I hope to find out soon. Watch this space.

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; 

The usual model of use for prediction is for users to have a personal lexicon that grows as they use it. The software bases its predictions on the start of what the user has typed so far in the word, but also on the words the user has already used, the number of times the words have been used, and how recently used.

Supporting the needs of such a user can be rather time consuming. For pupils who may not be long time users of prediction, it may be better to create a class lexicon or topic lexicons. It is important, using Penfriend, which usually saves a lexicon at the end of a session, that the teacher turns off this option in the ‘advanced options’ menu.

The lexicon is best  place for this lexicon is to put it in a shared area of the network where pupils have read but not write access to the lexicon. The teacher can add words in a variety of ways while being sure that pupils cannot accidentally get rid of the lexicon.

It has been clear for a while that mp3 players would be excellent devices for the visually impaired. However, many have very small displays that make them unusable by VI users. This new device is a lot more than just an mp3 player. However it is most notable for being on of the few devices of its kind with voice output to allow navigation. It has no screen and all the commands are entered via key presses. The results are heard as spoken prompts.

This is a a very impressive solution in the school setting, to the problem of delivering learning materials in audio format to pupils in a portable format. Its size is just larger than a large mp3 player or mobile phone.

It can read out text or play files in a variety of formats;

• Talking Books – These are DAISY books, which usually have audio recording of text.
• Other Books – These are mp3 files. a series of files in a folder are treated as a book of sequential sections or chapters. This would be the folder to put a text book that had been turned into audio using a voice such as Heather – see previous post.
• Textfiles – plain .txt files and webpages can be stored here, to be read out by the internal voice of the Stream
• Music – Your music mp3s go here
• Notes – You can record voice notes, or lectures using the internal mike or an external one. They are stored here.

The Stream uses standard SD cards as a storage medium. These are cheap and the contents can easily be backed up onto a spare SD card.

Generally the means of navigation has been well thought out. There are faults. The folder structure of the text files “Bookshelf” is not reflected in the navigation system. This has been pointed out to the developers and it is believed that an improvement will be implemented soon. Fortunately, upgrades are made available at no cost from the developer’s website.

The internal voice which reads the static commands is excellent. However the voice that read the filenames and the text files themselves is not as clear and requires greater concentration. A UK voice is available from the website, but it is not recommended that users upgrade to this unless a new clearer version becomes available

One last gripe; It is hard to get to grips with a whole new operating system on a device with no screen. Sighted people are not used to it. the documentation does not really live up to the ideal of providing “What you need to know in the order you need it”

At last a really good implementation of MP3 player technology well designed for VI users. Also specialist technology for VI users that is not very expensive. Early adopters are not penalised as upgrades are free and simple to effect.

A word of advice if you are supporting a young user of the Steam. Take it home for a week and use it as your Mp3 player, means of accessing podcasts and listening to blogs. It works!

.

Thanks to the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University, I have been able to use the newly licensed Scottish voice Heather. I have used it to create audio versions of text files. These have been prepared for a VI pupil who will listening to them using a Victor Reader Stream which will be the subject of a blog very soon, I hope.

Heather really is one of the clearest synthesised voices I have heard on a computer. She is a SAPI 5 voice and I have used the voice very well using Penfriend V 3.1 and Wordtalk, the free text to speech utility for MS Word. I also used a trial version of Wordtalk (v4.0) which turns marked text into a .wav or .mp3 audio file.

Here is a file of a short text that I made using WordTalk (4.0) I think sounds as good or better than any text to speech I have heard. – Wax in a candle. I improved the clarity by putting commas into longer sentences.

The text is taken from here http://wwr.wikispaces.com/Materials

Of course, the great thing is that the voice is definitely Scottish. She can manage Scottish place names rather well. Send me some text for Heather to roll her tongue round. Paste it into a comment!

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.