Reading the internet

Connie,
There are some excellent tools available but it’s hard to make specific recommendations without having more information.
What did the IEP team recommend when they considered your son for assistive technology? What have they already tried? How do they see your son completing this project?
Are the school computers PC or Mac based?
Give us some more information and we will try to help you because there is great software available that provides text-to-speech output.

The idea just came up at our last IEP meeting. There is not a specific recommendation yet. Much of this project will be done at home, so I’m looking for something that will run on our home computer. The school uses Macs and we use Windows XP. My son can read fairly well, but the volume of reading demanded by this project will overwhelm him. We are talking about ways that he can do a lot of the preliminary research by listening to various articles on his intended topic. For the writing part, he will use Inspiration software for organization. Thanks for any help you can give. If I need to provide more info, do let me know.

Connie,
<My son can read fairly well, but the volume of reading demanded by this project will overwhelm him.>

There are a few options to consider but the IEP team should be involved with this because it it supposed to be a TEAM decision. Plus, federal law states that EVERY child on an IEP must be considered for assistive technology.
With that said, Encarta reference library (2004 available at Costco for $50.00 with a $30 mail-in rebate - best deal in town!) has a read back feature built into the software. It is an excellent reference source.

For internet text-to-speech, there are a few options ranging from cut and paste into the program to reading online. Different program offer different features. ReadPlease is a free program (download at www.readplease.com) which requires you to cut and paste and is not very customizable but it is free. TextAloudMP3 is a low cost program that is inexpensive but has great quality voice for an additional $30.00.
CAST eReader is $200 but it allow you to have two screens open and is fully customizable. WYNN or Kurzweil are top of the line and offer additional features (best scanning software, fully customizable, study skills tools, talking dictionary, etc, etc).
There are a few other versions as well. Most of these are Windows only. The Mac offers text-to-speech built into its operating system which requires you to cut and paste into your word processing program such as AppleWorks.
Hope this helps.

This is slightly off-topic because it’s not directly related to your question about text-to-speech.

Just thought I’d mention that when my kids do research projects, we copy the entire contents of the web page (or sometimes just the relevant parts) into a Word document we create specifically for original source material. Avoids a lot of wasted time if you ever need to go back to the web page again. At the top page of every article, we paste in the URL of the web site so they can find the site later and so that they can use it in the bibliography. If we have a book from the library, we scan in the pages we need using optical character recognition.

Once you have the source material in a Word document, your child can use the highlight tool to mark the sentences/paragraphs that have the important information. I usually sit with them to speed this up a bit, because my kids can’t seem to identify what’s relevant and what’s not.
Then we copy the highlighted pieces into another document and that becomes a really rough working copy. We use the highlight tool (or an alternate text color - sometimes different colors for different sources) to indicate that the text is still in the author’s original words. Then they can drag-and-drop the pieces around until they seem to make some sense. Meanwhile, they have to listen to my speech about plagiarism. We only change the color back to normal after they have changed the highlighted sentences into their own words.

My kids didn’t think Inspiration was worth the trouble. It seems really difficult to change the outline if you decide to reorganize the topics.

Getting stuff read to him often ignores the other rather monstrous issues of organizing research. Gathering information for research is a sophisticated skill.
Yes, there are text-to-speech tools that will “read” stuff for you, but in my experience that’s usually not the critical issue, *especially* with the Internet. It’s wading through the HUGE amounts of materials (which generally has only tangential connections to the research yhour’e doing) to get what you need. Most of these guys have only done (if that) “paraphrase from the encyclopedia” research and this is a few quantum leaps different.

Thanks very much for the ideas—both practical as well as things to think about. For now, we have downloaded the new product of Read Please which reads the internet and we are looking at Draftbuilder with the Technical Resources person at school. Thanks for the suggestions.They’ll go in the History Day file.

I don’t think it’s far off topic since the real problem is doing research and often there are more issues than just the decoding of the words on a web page. Kids who haven’t been reading, have been doing some fascinating things disguised as research, and frankly most students without reading problems do lots of things that sort of look like research, some nice cutting and pasting, and running into major difficulties when a teacher asks for the real thing; in turn, teachers run into major difficulties when they ask for the real thing (even the fairly basic “get information from three different sources, organize it into two pages of information”) so they often don’t. (I didn’t learn to do it until eleventh grade and that was a course that started with a paragraph and worked up to multiple sources, etc., with an awful lot of practice making your Topic Sentences match your Controlling IDeas and your details int he paragraph match your topic sentences. How often did I see “Supports CI??” )

So… yes, there are tools out there — but honestly, you need to figure out whether they will address the real issues.

I know you said you use XP at home and he uses Macs at school.

Any Mac, current or sold in the past 3 years can read anything on the internet with almost any web browser, right out of the box.

I can select any text in this field and have it read right now. Or, I can open a new window, go to http://www.nytimes.com/ and select any text on the screen and have it read (they use graphical drop caps which are a problem for this kind of screen reading but it’s not a big deal).

Nothing extra to buy.

Nothing extra to install.

No extra steps of copying and pasting into another application.

I’m running Mac OS X.3 (the latest OS on Macs) and it’s amazing how easy and well it works for reading things aloud.

I don’t use this myself but I demo it for large groups. I was in Florida the other day and read pieces of the online New York Times aloud. The audience (mostly Windows users) were blown away at how easy it was (and is).

It does not have to be hard. If it’s too hard, he will not do it.

However, that said, Sue has a good point: sorting through research and getting things in order is another piece, a most important piece of this puzzle.

However, these pieces go hand in hand because you have to be able to read to sort: you have to be able to read/hear what’s on the screen to decide to keep or reject it.

Then there’s the plagiarism issue which is also a biggie. But that’s not a technical issue; that’s an issue a teacher and/or a parent has to explain and correct.

Hello,

I have just recieved a copy of texthelps read and write version 7. This has a feature called web highlighting that will speak all of the text and tags on a website as well as dual colour highlighting the text for the dyslexic user to read. This system is sold as the most comprehensive literacy support tool on the market and I would tend to agree.

It can also speech enable and dual colour highlight pdf files.

Not only that but it has special search facilities and project support tools that my 13yr old son has found great for his assignments. I think this could be what you are looking for.

The company that sells this product can be found at: www.texthelp.com

Duncan

Let me tell you of an exciting software firm called Premier Software at the following web site:
www.readingmadeeasy.com

They have a talking brouser call OFF Limits browser. As a parent or school you can set paramiters of which websites show up. Additionally the browser eliminates pop-up ads and all advertising images on a page!!! This way you only see and concentrate on text and images necessary to actually read. ($29)!

They are working on a program that has the total functionality of Kurzweil 3000 or WYNN but only costs $150 for parents to buy!!! This software should be available within the next month. Their current software Scan and Read Pro will scan and read but without the graphics being saved. In the next month they will have our version which they call see what you scan which will save the graphics.

Text-to-audio will turn text to reading aloud which you can automatically burn to a CD ($29)!!!

This is an exceptional opportunity for both parents and schools to acquire adaptive assistive software at a reasonable price!!

Jim — Michigan
I do not sell this software. I am planning to demonstrate it to as many parents and schools as possible.

Jim,

Along the same lines, anyone with any model Macintosh can read anything on the web without buying a thing.

Older Macs running OS 9 just need the addition of a simple utility which is free and can be downloaded here:

http://www.ldresources.com/files/hearit.sea.hqx

Newer Macs running OS X can read right out of the box with no additional software.

Go to System Preferences in the Apple menu
Click on Speech on the bottom row of icons
Click “Spoken User Interface”
Check “Selected text when key is pressed”
Click “Set Key…” and set it to somehthing like Control T

Now quit System preferences

Go to any web site, select some text, hold down the Control key (crtl) and hit “t” and the text will be spoken in the default voice.

Want to change the voice and speech rate? Go back to the Speech Preference Pane and click Default Voice and change it.

Simple. Free. Works like a charm.

Hello Richard:

It is been about a year and a half since I was a Macintosh user. Never did get to use OS X :-(. But when I was on a Macintosh I used a great shareware program called TexEdit Plus from Trans-Tex Software. This software utilizes built-in text-to-speech Macintosh/synthesizer. You can set the voice speed easily. I did a great deal of reading using this little utility. I believe the cost is about $25. It is also one of the most handy utilities for editing things on a Macintosh. Used to love my Macintosh :-) until I started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking with a PC :-). Too bad they don’t make Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Macintosh.
Jim — Michigan

I’ve pushed TexEdit Plus for years.

It runs well in OS X, costs $15 and has great speech capabilities.

http://www.tex-edit.com/

However, to read the internet or any fixed content with it, you have to copy/paste content.

My post above is about reading in any application, including a web browser.

The idea is, you drag over some text (like this text) and hold down a key and press another key and your computer speaks the text.

Fewer steps, easy.

Hello Richard:

Does the speech feature for spoken interface work with both OS 9 and OS X?
Next time I’m on the Macintosh I will give it a try. Lots of people in our office have a Macintosh. Thanks for the tips. I’m anxious to give a go.

Jim — Michigan

Jim,

As stated above, to use speech everywhere in OS 9 you need to install a free system extension which you can download at the url mentioned.

In OS X, yes, everything can talk.