The App "Speak It! Text To Speech" is one of a growing number of mobile Apps that helps students access their learning while they are busy and mobile. Although the reviews of this application located in the iPhone App store vary dramatically, this is what one graduate student, Essentiae, has to say about how she uses this App.
Her heading is: "I can't believe how much I love this app!...""
I'm a graduate student in a reading-intensive program and have been using this app to help me keep up with all different kinds of readings: I copy articles from my instapaper or my rss reader and listen while walking to and from the office. I copy OCR's academic readings into it (I usually email the text to myself from a PDF on my desktop) and listen to them while doing chores and errands so as to increase my familiarity with them. I have it read long papers that I've written back to me as a method of proofreading them when my eyes are no longer picking up subtle stylistic quirks. This app has really improved the way I work. There is no shortage of ways to use it..." (Essentiae, 2011, September).
Essentiae's use of this App reveals an interesting way for graduate students to keep up with a large volume of readings and other academic tasks. "Speak-It: Text-to-Speech" would also be a great tool for certain students with disabilities, such as those with vision problems or text processing disabilities.
However, for students, disabled or not, to make maximum use of text-to-speech tools such as "Speak-It: Text-to-Speech, creators of documents (in formats such as PDFs, Microsoft Word, and others) need to create their documents with accessibility in mind. If documents are not optimized for accessibility, then text-to-speech software, whether it is the mobile or desk-top version, will not be able to read these documents. In some cases, the documents won't be able to be read at all. In other cases, the text may come out as gibberish. See my blog post entitled "Paradox: Articles that talk about accessibility of E-Text
are not accessible!" for an example of one PDF that wasn't optimized for readability. There you will have an opportunity to read the gibberish that results when text-to-speech readers read documents that are not optimized for accessibility.
Importantly, creating accessible documents is a human rights principle that is now embedded in the laws of many countries. With more and more students utilizing mobile text-to-speech Apps, optimizing documents for accessibility is a practice that has value for all users, not just students with disabilities.
What is your favourite educational mobile App? Why do you like it?
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