RE: Cognitive Access Three Types of guidelines or strategies?

Marti,

CAST has been working on TTS for learners, including those with LD, for many
years.  Our eReader demo can be downloaded from

http://www.cast.org/tools/teachingtoolsreader.html

and used freely for 2 weeks or 10 sessions.  This is a 10MB download so it's
good to have a fast connection.  I suspect that you have a cable modem.

I mention this only to indicate that attention to TTS with navigation
controls and synchronized highlighting of text spoken in Rich Text documents
or in the Internet Explorer component inside the eReader application can
support struggling readers while traversing frames and tables.

We also created special Windows and Mac versions for Houghton Mifflin Social
Studies CD-ROMs for use in California.  As long as the text content is RTF
or HTML, there is no problem reading it with TTS.  I should note that we
feel that it is critical for the text to highlight while it is spoken for
this population.  It encourages following along and in our ongoing research,
we have found that in time, some students turn off the TTS and use
highlighting to pace their reading.

This is not a sales pitch.  I just want you to know that this exists.  In
fact, if you have a use for it and can provide feedback about how to make it
better, I'll make sure you get it for free.  There are issues pertaining to
page content authoring that are important for this type of tool to work well
and the WAI Guidelines provide a terrific baseline.  We do want TTS to work
in complex media-rich Web-based environments and we are getting there.

Chuck

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 17:40:05 UTC