Text to Audio

Since I work in the Office of Disability Services at UF, I have been doing some research for my boss on assistive technology for the students who use ODS. One of these technologies happened to be a program called "Text to Audio" and it is put out by Premier Assistive Technology (you can visit their website at http://www.premier-programming.com/home.htm). My job was to look into the program, see if it would work for us, and find a price (which was pretty easy since they actually have it listed on the site!!!). ODS orders books on tape for students who have difficulty reading and need the auditory support, so my job was to see if this particular program would work if we scanned in the textbook and used the program to read back to the student.

In the end, it doesn't work that way. This program takes Word documents (it also can read HTML, Rich Text and Standard ASCII file formats) and "learns" the text and then it reads the document to you. The program actually creates a WAV or MP3 file of the document. This program also includes software to burn CDs so another program is not needed. This makes it a little easier. And since it can put the documents on a CD, you can tell it to make each document a separate track (just like how music CDs have a different track for each song). The other big "feature" this program boasts is that you can actually bookmark sections you want. So if you're reading through the actual textbook and wanted to highlight a definition, you could theoretically do this on the CD using a bookmark. Plain and simple, the bookmark is just another track on the CD. But if you know that the definition for "technology" is in Chapter 5 and the track for the definition is #12, then you could simply skip to track 12 to hear the definition of technology.

There are a couple "How to use" videos on the website, which give excellent explanations on how to use the program. The program itself is simple to use, it takes approximately five minutes or so to convert a Word document to a WAV file, but that also depends on the size of the document. The program also has different voices to choose from. And you also have the option to change the speed and pitch of the voices as well.