What a great fortune it is to work in an environment where every student is issued a Chromebook in grades 1-8. This is a HUGE game changer in the delivery of AT. In working with students who require AEM (Accessible Educational Materials), we use Bookshare, a free service that provides hundreds of thousands of print materials to qualifying individuals.
Bookshare suggests many reading tools that have been selected by users. On the Chromebook side, we have been using the Bookshare Web Reader, which is integrated into Chrome. However, for some of the students I work with, the Chrome OS text to speech voice is “very robotic”, “not natural”, and “bothersome” (I tend to concur, and would love a day when Chrome OS would deliver a Native TTS voice that is comparable to Apple’s Alex or to a human-narrated voice).
Until that day arrives, we’ve come up with a workaround that has proven to be effective with these students. By overlapping Read and Write for Google’s Web based TTS reader to read Bookshare books to students, it’s become a well received option to providing access to AEM for our students. Read and Write is an easy to use tool that students are familiar with, is provided to every student in our district, and has a nice variety of voices. Plus, the word highlighting is more pronounced.
To see how this works, I’ve created a brief video to illustrate the point:
Sometimes, a simple workaround is all that is needed to continue to provide access to content in a way that most makes sense for the end user. If you’re in need of a Chromebook option for a better voice for Bookshare’s Web Reader, consider using Read and Write in concert.
Do you have a favorite reading tool that you use? Leave a comment and share!
