Human Reader for textbooks/ journal articles?
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Anonymous
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My dyslexic DD is in 11th grade and is increasingly having to read journal articles in addition to textbooks for her sciences and electives.
While she can decode effectively, she prefers to listen first to aid in comprehension. She has used Audible for audiobooks for English for years and that is a great solution for her. But for the journal articles she is using voice to text with the pdfs. The difference in ease of comprehension is huge. She has asked me to read the journal articles aloud to her and that really helps. (I used to volunteer to make the cassette recordings of textbooks for visually impaired students in college.) But this isn’t really sustainable. Has anyone found a service or publisher that provides human recordings of journal articles and other technical documents? |
Anonymous
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I have found the Facebook group: IST Tech Savvy Solutions to be very informative. They may have some suggestions. I know there are some text to speech programs that let you play with the voice and speed.
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Anonymous
| There are digital solutions to this. Apps, etc. do a bit of googling. |
Anonymous
| Just teach her to read them aloud the first time through. She can record it or not. |
Anonymous
Thanks for this suggestion! I think it is more about reading with proper emphasis and phrasing than the voice and speed. Her dyslexia tutor called it prosody. But if she hasn’t mastered the content, she can’t get the phrasing right to record it. |
Anonymous
OP have you called Learning Ally to ask them for suggestions? Presumably this is a challenge that many of their users face upon graduation or aging out, and maybe they could point you to groups that address this need. https://learningally.org/solutions-for-home/college-adults |
Anonymous
She has dyslexia, PP. that means that “just reading it out loud” is asking her to do what her dyslexia stands in the way of her doing. |
Anonymous
DP. OP said that her DD's decoding is fine but she can comprehend better when listening. My DS (12 grade) is similar. When he's reading for fun, it's not such a big deal but when it comes to educational materials, often, he can either decode or he can comprehend. It's hard for him to do both at the same time. He prefers human voice to electronic and has been reading and recording educational materials for quite a while. We used to do it for him but as he's gotten older, he's done more of it himself. I suspect when he goes to college, he'll rely more on electronic voice. |
Anonymous
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You could try checking on resources for blind students.
When I was in college, a legally blind classmate of mine asked me to read a couple chapters of our economics textbook so he could record it. I did it as a favor, but he insisted on paying me through some kind of program he was associated with. (This was around 1990.) I got the impression that he had help for all of his textbooks. That community may be the best to turn to for resources. |
Anonymous
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Learning Ally has audio books for free some (many?) of which have human voices.
Bookshare also has a text to speech function. I haven't checked it in a long time - it had mostly electronic voices but those are getting better and it may have more human sounding ones. It's free and kids with dyslexia qualify. Someone at your school can qualify you or you can qualify your dd by submitting some paperwork to the Bookshare website. Bookshare has probably the largest collection of textbooks and scientific stuff - not sure about journals. I think some apps (not clear if they are bookshare affiliated) have better voices - Natural Reader, Voice Dream, & others I think? The apps offer free voices and "premium" voices. Speechify is an app or toolbar add on - the voice is great, but it is expensive (140/yr) and the reviews seemed to indicate that when it worked, the voice was good but that the app was very glitchy. Also seems to limit how much you get per month. There is also Kurzweil 3000. Most schools and universities offer this to their dyslexic students because it includes workspace for writing. Not sure of voice quality. Finally, the AI world is exploding and there are many new AI tools for recording lectures and converting to transcript as well as reading text aloud. I just tried murf.ai and the voice was great but it appears to be a business product. Does your DD have an IEP or 504. Every school system must provide reading assistance tools to anyone diagnosed as dyslexic - at a minimum a dyslexic kid can qualify for a 504, which doesn't require "adverse impact". Dyslexia, even if decoding has been remediated - is still so cognitively exhausting for dyslexic kids that they qualify for accommodations. If rate, fluency or comprehension are impacted, there's even more of a reason. You can be a straight-A dyslexic kid in all advanced classes and still qualify for accomms on a 504. If you are in MCPS, please ask for your school to contact HIAT (High Incidence Assistive Learning Tech or Team?) which is supposed to have the expertise to select and provide appropriate supportive technology. If they aren't providing free natural voice reading - ask them why NOT? It is out there and school systems should be buying licenses for this technology. You might want to surf around various university disability websites - they all have to offer dyslexia accommodations like text to speech - you can see what they are using. Oh, and I can't believe I almost forgot National Library for the Blind! Also free if you are dyslexic (and for other kinds of disabilities) |
Anonymous
| Google it OP. You'll see that your child's computer will read anything to her that she has on her screen. My DH is a physician and has dyslexia. This is the only way he can access journal articles and CMEs. |
Anonymous
| OMG. Everyone telling OP to google it, read the darn post. Op's daughter knows how to make a mechanical computer voice do it. The problem is that the mechanical computer voice has the wrong prosody and it is interfering with comprehension. |
Anonymous
+1 MCPS steers students towards Bookshare (electronic voice, no prosody). What they won't tell you is that they have a handful of Learning Ally (human voice) subscriptions. Ask them about it. Other school systems purchase Learning Ally for all the students who need it. |
Anonymous
Thank you for taking the time to write out all of these suggestions! We are a military family stationed overseas in a an international school in a country without disability laws. So while in the U.S., DD had an IEP and then a 504. She had access to Learning Ally at her school. And her decoding: comprehension were going really well. And she had stopped using a lot of the tools she regularly accessed before. Now she is taking advanced classes and we need to revisit the tech supports for the initial read of articles if possible. She can wade through with the built in speech tools. But she broke down and told me a few days ago that it is just exhausting and so much easier when I read them to her for the first time. It really took us back to when she started OG tutoring in kindergarten and she was just exhausted from the mental effort. I know this is the natural progression and she needs to work through how to make this work for college and grad school. I was just hoping someone had found an AI-powered solution already. It looks like there is a lot on ongoing research on leveraging syntax to improve AI-generated text to voice prosody. But the only tools I see commercially available are for businesses. Thanks everyone for the suggestions! |
Anonymous
| She should be able to change the vocalizer on her computer to be more human like. Or does she want a recording? vs having to manipulate the technology? especially for a text book if you have a human reader, reading jargon and math that is specific to the content area correctly is very important. |