Transcript
One of the things that we're learning about assistive technology is that it's something that we can't just provide to a student. Often we think by the fact that we gave a computer that can read out loud to a student that would fix the decoding or fluency issues. That's not the case. What we have to do is we actually have to look at the research that's been done on the technology to learn how to customize the technology for an individual.
For example, text-to-speech software, there are four things that we know we have to do. The first thing is we have to find a program that has what we call high quality voices. Sounds very natural. When we use more computer-sounding voices it actually takes your brain almost three times longer to process that voice than it does a high quality text-to-speech voice.
The second thing is we have to control the speed at which the computer's reading to us at. Often students love to sit down and jack that computer up to 300 words a minute. Now, they recognize the individual words, called intelligibility, but what they don't have is comprehensibility, they don't understand all the words put together. And again through research what we're finding is we have to slow it down to between 140 and 180 words a minute.
The third thing is we have to have what's known as bi-modal reading, the student has to see the word and hear the word simultaneously. So software that highlights the word is better than software that just reads out loud to an individual.
And the fourth thing, which is in a very small number of cases at this point, is what we call phrasing or selection. And this is where the computer actually puts in a natural pause at the end of a phrase. If the software doesn't do that, then the recommendation is to have the student only select one sentence or one paragraph at a time, to have that read back to them. And when we find that we control the voice, control for the speed, we have bi-modal reading and we're selecting a small amount of text, then student's comprehension when using the software increase significantly.
