CELA and Accessible Reading Technologies, Devices, and Apps
all right we're all set for charmine please take it away okay thank you for coming out today everyone uh this webinar will aim to introduce you to the different kinds of accessible reading technologies that exist and are available to people with print disabilities um to begin with here's an outline of what we're going to be covering today we will first begin by going over what print disab ilities are by definition and then we'll have a breakdown of what the term accessible reading technology actually means and then we'll look at some examples of accessible formats and what they might amount to and then we'll start to get into some different types of accessible reading Technologies with demonstrations and videos to illustrate them so it'll be like a survey of the different technologies that are available you'll get a taste of uh things like text to speech programs and what they're all about we'll get into some examples of literacy support software uh Braille reading devices screen magnifiers Daisy players and more affordable audiobook players uh we'll go over some voice activated devices and some accessible reading apps as well so a whole range of uh technology there then we will conclude the presentation by sharing some learning res sources on where you can get more information or try some of these Technologies out for yourself so to begin with a print disability is a condition that prevents a person from Reading ordinary print and in the Canadian Copyright Act there are actually uh three types of print disabilities and they're not an exhaustive list there are probably more out there but these are the types that specify the kinds of conditions that can legally qualify a person to have access to alternate format materials uh the first are visual disabilities like blindness or low vision as well as the inability to focus or move one's eyes the second are physical conditions uh or they're often called motor disabilities or motor challenges such as cerebral paly sever arthritis paralysis or Ms that prevent a person from holding a book or turning Pages due to them being unable to effectively use their hands the Third Kind of print disability is any impairment that relates to comprehension like a learning disability uh such as dyslexia is the most common one where there are differences in the brain that prevent the person from processing or making sense of the print even though they are able ble to visually see the print on the page uh they need it in an alternate format in order to make sense of it um like audio format for instance so these conditions might be uh appear one at a time so a person could just have one of them or they might be combined so for example a person can have dyslexia along with a visual impairment or they can be temporary um such as cataracts so they won't be if if someone has cataracts they won't be able to read uh print as it as it is in its in its original state now we'll look at what accessible reading technology really means and the idea uh with this is that offering the content alone in Access in an accessible format is only a small part of the process that needs to be implemented in order for materials to be truly made accessible to those living with print disabilities it's often actually assumed that oh we just have to make our content accessible we just have to make the books that we offer in accessible format and and that that's it but that's actually only part of the story and a lot more needs to be done in order to make things truly accessible um so in addition to content being offered in in accessible formats the entire process of finding acquiring and reading the materials or books needs to be made just as accessible so for example uh this is not something that we often think about but if we broke it down a little bit the website or database or catalog or electronic system that's used to search for books like the libraryies website or the ebook provider's website for example need to be designed with accessibility in mind so that people who use Adaptive Technologies like screen readers or screen magnet ification programs can easily access and use them and also the players apps or devices used to read the content being offered must be made accessible and usable as well next we're uh going to look at some examples of accessible formats and one such example is called UB and this is the standard non proprietary ebook format that ensures that ebooks are made fully accessible in terms of their text content and book navigation the most recent version of um this kind of book called ePub is known as ePub 3 and it works with most updated accessible reading softwares and apps it's managed and maintained by an organization called the w3c Consortium which also manages the standards for website accessibility this is something that is not often uh thought about as well um unless you work in the accessibility space websites also need to be made accessible it is not just that it's digital and available on computers isn't enough to make websites or apps accessible um the next example of accessible format is Daisy which is widely known it's the format that is most often thought of um that's intended for use by those with print disabilities it comes in human narrated audio format as well as text format that can be read aloud via synthetic Voice or with a refreshable braille display which we'll go over later books in this format are known as Daisy books and uh they can be accessed via digital download or from a CD uh and Daisy St stands for a digital uh I think it stands for a digitally accessible information system and audiobooks are another example of accessible formats and they are often enjoyed by people regardless of whether they have a print disability or not and I'm talking about commercially accessible audiobooks um but the main difference between commercially available audiobooks that you can get from places like Audible and other companies is that the audiobooks offered here at CA um come in Daisy format and this allows for more detailed and precise navigation that doesn't usually exist in a commercially available audiobook so usually when you play a commercially available audiobook it just mainly allows you to play the book from start to finish but there's very little control over if you want to navigate by chapter by Page by paragraph or by heading uh and and uh these are made possible in this Daisy format the reader has a lot more control over what what's possible when you navigate through the book and the last example of of accessible format is Braille and this is a tactile method for reading by Touch by people who are uh totally blind or have partial sight and can be embossed onto paper or or read electronically with a braille display which you'll get to see in action later on and finally before we move on it's important to note that the time it takes for something to be made accessible can vary quite a lot depending on what it is some materials like novels and other literary or text based materials take less time um whereas if you have books with Graphics pictures tables or math content can take considerably longer because they are not often readily accessible from the publisher and they must be manually adapted especially if they're going to be transcribed into a braille format if you are going to be transcribing a math textbook into Braille format it can take almost you know six months to one year to make it to adapt everything including all pictures and graphs and math equations because those things are usually also not accessible by screen reading Technologies now we'll move on to looking at some examples of some accessible reading Technologies we will start with screen readers uh these are they've been around for many decades and they form the basis for most other accessible Technologies so they're a good foundational point to start our survey into the land of accessible reading Technologies and these what are screen readers well they Convert digital text normally displayed on the computer screen or on the tablet screen for others to see with their eyes they convert that text into spoken words so that people with print disabilities can efficiently navigate and access content uh and interact with the content that's displayed on the computer screen or on their phone or on their tablet and the interaction is done with keyboard commands most of these users like myself have to learn many keyboard commands to press rather than using a mouse pointer and doing Mouse clicks to get around their computer and do what they need to do there are many different kinds of screen readers some are free and some are paid and some even come built into devices that they're compatible with right out of the box which we really like um no need to install anything else you just buy the product off the shelf and you can use it once you turn on the screen reader an example of which uh I'll demonstrate I'll demonstrate a thirdparty screen reader in a minute it's a it's a paid screen reader um that runs on a subscription fee it's called Jaws or job access with speech it works on Windows computers and it must be installed separately uh another screen reader for Windows is called nvda or nonvisual desktop access this is a free screen reader and can be installed onto any computer running Windows um and another and other examples that come built in right out of the box uh that are built in right into the product is voice over and that's Apple's built-in screen raer for Mac computers or iPhones or iPads so if you have any uh devices like that around you you have access to them uh you can turn that screen reader on and try it out for yourself it ensures that those devices come accessible right out of the box and no need to install anything else and this is a good option for anyone to explore uh whether they need a screen reader or not if they want to try this out and experience the feeling of using a screen reader to navigate so now I'll give you a quick demonstration of how a screen user like myself would use Jaws to launch the sea website on a computer uh and the browser I'll be using as Edge I'm going to start out by sharing my screen and I'll share my sound new button have started screen press now I've shared my screen and I explain what's happening um SC control I'm G to be starting to press I'm going to be doing a a very simple task which is going to Microsoft Edge participants can and I'm GNA be going to Microsoft Edge and launching the ca website that's all I'm going to do and how this is going to work is when a person uses a screen reader they are not going to look around on their screen for Microsoft Edge and double click it they're going to be pressing keyboard commands to get there so the first thing I'm going to be doing is pressing uh a keyboard command to get me to the search box where I can type in Microsoft Edge search box edit type in text computer and the speed that you're hearing it at is the speed that's quite fast it's what uh people normally have their screen readers set to talk at so now I'm at the search box and I'm going to type in Edge e e Microsoft Ed Microsoft recommended browser press right to switch preview Microsoft Ed Microsoft recommended browser and so what it's saying uh in case you weren't able to catch it is it's saying Microsoft Edge that tells me it's selected and I'm going to press enter to open it site bar is now visible address and search bar edit BL type and text now I'm in the address bar and it's telling me it's telling me a bunch of information that I won't get into but it's basically telling me I'm in the address bar and I can type in um and as you can see here I'm going to type in the ca web address now and as I type it'll tell me what I'm typing w w w period c e l a l i d r a r y period C A and then I'm going get into this Microsoft personal list of fre items loading complete page has five regions 17 headings and 60 links there are five smart glams highlights on this page vertical barell heading level two service alert heading level new newspap and so what happened when I typed in c.ca is that Jaws started to read aloud in the same way that you would start to see the contents of the homepage and if had I had let it it would continue to read from the top to the bottom and so now you might be wondering well what what happens from there if it just keeps on reading and the idea is that you can press different keyboard commands to control what's being read aloud so if I press the letter H for instance it would move me to the first heading Center for Equitable Library access heading level one that says Center for Equitable Library access and then the commands just go on from there basically so I'm going to close the browser now Al four manual I'm G to go back and stop sharing my screen X screen share IMM controls to move to an item press the arrow keys so I stopped sharing my screen and as you can see just from that it reads everything out quite literally that I need to know in order for me to use the computer so it's not just reading the text or you know parts of web pages it's reading every single button it's reading every single link or program and giving me hints on what I need to do to respond to what's being read out loud the next example of accessible reading technology is literacy support and these are for people who have uh literacy needs needs that will uh it's almost like they need some help in um making the acquiring the knowledge of learning how to read and write to be made more accessible so it's not just viewing the text or having the text read aloud these are people who need um more help with knowing uh what words are and meanings of words and making the process of reading and writing uh and comprehension a little bit easier for them so there is a software it's called uh it's it's made for Google Chrome uh made from Google Chrome which you can use to try it out if you want to experience it it's called The read and write software and we're now going to look at a video of a teacher using it to read a PDF document and we'll see what that's all about hi I'm Jamie ke at teachers Tech tonight we're going to take a look at an add-on called read and write for Google Chrome uh this is a great program to boost confidence for reading and writing in students so stick around for a full tutorial one of my probably my favorite feature is the readback feature because um I find it eliminates the long lineups I have at my desk all the time and uh so how it works is in it in a couple different ways and you can change the settings here so if I just go from the start here and hit play the wri for likely formed during the EOC there and I'll just pause it there you can see if I pause it the yellow stays there the highlighted but if I stop it it goes away um so if I didn't like the way it sounded if I wanted a different uh voice all I have to do is go to my settings and I can see if I wanted it all of a sudden in a UK voice and I'll go with Serena here and I'll um turn it fast here hit okay and I'll just go back to it and hit play one more time the rainforest likely formed during the EOC era it appeared following a glue and I'll just stop it there because I think you get the point of how that works so another way can do the read up uh readout is if you just go to this Screenshot Reader right here so if I select the Screenshot Reader I can um now just pick a certain area that I want red so if I highlight right there it's going to just load it up here and just say that sentence clate was Dr in Savanah and it will just re only say that one so again and if I want it off I can just turn it off like so uh so those are some kind of a cool features that I probably use all the time uh the students I um it's nice to have headphones in your class uh so you don't get overwhelmed uh with all the different readbacks that H are happening and all the different accents because the students do like to change their um the accents U on their readback so another uh cool feature I find is the uh is the highlighting here so if I uh take a word like uh whoops I better turn off my Screenshot Reader here uh if I uh go over to uh let's say oops turn on the wrong things here my mouse is kind of stuck inside this one I don't want this on anymore all right there it goes so um so if I highlight a word like rainforest and then uh go up to highlight here and then just highlight like so uh then U you can see that it's in yellow if I don't want it anymore I can just highlight it again and then clear the highlights so if if I highlighted a few different ones I'll just do in a few different colors just to give an example here um if there was words or I was looking for uh to make a list from and I'll just I'm just going to pick two you can see what I was trying to do I could go through and pick a few more colors but if I wanted to create a list on a separate page of those words all I need to do is hit collect highlights so it ask me what colors I'm just going to hit okay here and what it's doing right now it's going to create me a new Google uh doc here that shows the highlight words that I have here and also gives me a link back to the original uh Google Docs here so if a student was going to do a vocabul list from this it'd be a great way to start uh but an easier way to do a vocabulary list with those same words I won't change that around is if I just go over here to uh vocabulary list and uh this time this will take about a couple seconds longer here it's going to create a brand new Google Docs here and you see what it can do here is uh it's still loading up here there it goes okay so it has the rainfor even puts the symbol in here and creates it in a nice uh table format for students to get a vocabul list so if they were going through not understanding or if you ask them uh even from a website they can do this and I'll show you this in a little bit it's all with the same um icons that we have at the top but you can use it as an extension in on a website too so uh those are some uh I find like I said a really uh tough a PDF file so I'm just inside my Google Drive drive right now and I have this short stories for children here that I'm going to open up it's a PDF file uh you just can't click on it unless you have your settings set as default so for instance I could uh I can rightclick um on on this or if I was going to open this here um if I just click on it I can see open with my read and right so I could do that option too or you could right click and then open with uh inic read right the other thing is you could change your settings in here and go to manage apps and then what you can do is click on used by default if you were opening in that all the time and then so once you open up this one it uh it's going to convert it with Google read WR and what you notice uh a lot of the things are the same in it so if I just I have my readback features uh the same way uh in it uh if I want to hit play and have it red uh this is the feature you can see how this box is opening up with all the Highlight features and the translate features if I don't want that to show up uh I can just turn it off right here but I can hit my my play here again and there's a few couple other options that you have in this and that's through okay so we actually didn't show the whole video but mainly it's uh that should give you a pretty good idea of what this read and write software is all about and what it does we actually share the PowerPoint with all of the participants at the end of the presentation and that will have links to the videos in their entirety if you want to play them and or or replay what we've shown now the next kind of accessible reading technology is called a refreshable braille display and what those devices are are they're basically uh they can be thought of as like rail computers I think those are the that's the easiest way to think about something like that they are devices that allow for text or Braille files to be displayed in a braille format so something like a Word document or a PDF or um or any kind of file type can be opened up on one of these devices uh and displayed and the words will be displayed in Braille for people to read by touch with their fingertips so instead of you or any uh cited person looking at a monitor they would be feeling the Braille the words in Braille on this device and depending on the kind of display being used and the size of it uh you're not looking at a big monitor where you can see all the diff all the pages all at once um only a single line of text or a few words can easily be displayed to the user can usually be displayed to the user at one time and the user has to repeatedly scroll down through a document line by line uh to have the display refresh and show the next block of text to be read um so for instance to give you an example I'm doing this uh presentation right now with a braille display and I'm reading my notes and it's displaying you know let's see uh I'd say about 10 words at a time and I'm having to read these words and press a button uh to advance to the next 10 words or so uh for it to display and so it's constantly uh constantly having to scroll down and these devices are quite costly in fact they cost above $2,000 and in most cases uh there's currently a lot of work being done in the braal tech technology space to make these devices bigger and more affordable to ensure that people can read uh more than one line of text at a time they're looking at making multi-line bra displays and also to ensure that these devices can be placed in the hands of more people who could really benefit from having access to them um so let's look at a video now which will help to make the concept of using a braille display make more sense and put it into context a little [Applause] bit all right this is Allison hiler and she is going to show us what a braille display looks like working with an uh an iPhone and uh what's what's the model here Allison this is an iPhone 4S and this brille display is called called a refresh a braille it's made by the American printing house for the blind the Braille display is all right and um so Braille is a combination of each letter is made of a combination of six dots and so I have dots one 2 3 four 5 o four five six on here and if I wanted to make an a I'd press one if I wanted to make a b it's dots one and two c is 1 and four D is 145 and so on and that would correspond to these little dots we see picking up right here right so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to I'm in tweet list right now which is Twitter app on the iPhone and so this is my Braille display is connected to my iPhone via Bluetooth right now and so I now I don't see tweet list open on your iPhone which is interesting now you do there it is okay it wasn't open yet I was on my home screen okay and no private tweets to be seen here so oh good I hope not okay it says Ali talk I can actually turn the speech off if you want to that's okay comp here's a compos button so I'm going to press this this little um button here is like a joystick I can move it to the right to move the display forward and read what's next or I can move it to the left to go backward and read the previous thing I'm looking okay so okay um if I want to press this button I'm going to press the button that I was just moving around text field it says text field is editing so okay so that was a little bit hopefully that would uh give you an a little bit of an idea of of what a braille display would look like in action um next we'll look at screen magnification programs or screen magnifiers these are for people who still have some remaining site uh that's functional and for people who still want to who can still read print if it's just made a little bit bigger or if the contract or if the color contrast is made um differently they can still read print uh they don't need to resort to Braille uh and these so these screen magnifiers are devices that allow for users with partial site to have text and images enlarged and made more visible by changing the color contrast an example of a there are examples of these like uh standal loone magnifiers where you put whatever it is you want enlarged underneath it like uh something on paper some text to put underneath and then it would just enlarge it but there are also computer programs that enlarge um digital material that's on a computer screen and an example of a common computer program that does this is called Zoom text which we'll show you a video of in a minute and it also has some basic text to speech capabilities uh that are nowhere near as advanced as screen readers that I showed you earlier but the text of speech on these programs like Zoom text uh they serve only the function of reading the text aloud so it doesn't uh speak aloud the buttons that the users need to use to interact with uh what they need to do on their apps or on their programs they mainly function to read aloud what the user selects which is the text of what they're reading and it's for people who would like to have the text displayed visually for them to see and they also need it to be read out loud like if they were reading larger blocks of text for example to give their eyes a break they'll need it to be read aloud or they might need to see it at the same time to really get what's being said there so let's look at a video now to illustrate this software and this video will show a program called Zoom text [Music] Fusion it's basically uh a program that's running in conjunction with the Jaws screen reader to act as where Jaws is acting as text to speech so now we'll we'll look at what that's all about in this section I'm going to be introducing you to the idea of Zoom text screen magnifier in this case case within the fusion Zoom text Fusion product which is a combination of Zoom text magnifier with the jaw screen reading program so I'm just looking here at a computer screen unmagnified I've got Zoom text mag uh Zoom text Fusion running at the moment um but with only one times magnification here one decree level button so to increase the magnification I could just use the mouse Point Fusion 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 zoom level button and now you'll see B uh you'll also hear it speaking in the background that's the uh the fusion Jaws speaking in the background there but the screen is now magnified 1.8 times and we can of course go larger than that I'm actually going to use the keyboard to do this now rather than the mouse I'm going to press the cap lock key with the up Arrow caps lock is the uh is the zoom text key and the up arrow is to indicate that were increasing the magnification 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 and here we are at
2.75 and as we go up to say three now we're seeing just one nth of the whole screen because we're at a three times magnification so if you imagine the screen divided into like a sections there would be nine rectangles that make up the entire screen we're seeing just one nth of that when we're at three times magnification this is the issue for people that use screen magnification they can't perceive the whole screen at once they have to either slide their Mouse pointer which I'm going to do now to a edge of the magnified screen which will then scroll under their eyes for them like this start button I can slide across the screen using my mouse pointer I can also control the computer just by using the keyboard so for example if I press the start button on the computer keyboard search I can type w r d Microsoft 2010 desktop app Microsoft you'll notice there's a focus rectangle around the the menu item and as my as I use my um enter enter key we magnify okay so that was basically a little bit of an idea of how Zoom text works um and how somebody uh would use screen magnification I'm now going to hand this over to Iana who's going to be uh talking about some more Technologies and demonstrating some of them for us uh she'll start with Daisy players and go on from there audio now unmuted start my video video now started hello everyone um stop my video but it's a pleasure to be here can Jessica can you just please confirm that I'm CA the Right video in terms of the yeah yeah it looks good thank you um yes so I would like to talk to you now about the what is called the daisy players Charmaine has already mentioned to you the daisy format the digital access to information system which allows navigating to through pages through uh chap CA member services sorry I will mute my phone capy Charlie speech off okay um and these players are probably the the most popular players that you might as Librarians have heard about are the daisy players uh from humanware which is the most used brand in Canada they can be either uh players like the one you see on the screen which can use CDs Daisy audio CDs um and also have access to Internet and then there are smaller players such as the Victor stream which is a more pocket sized player uh that only has access to Internet and does not support uh CDs um these players like like all technology that's specially made for people with print disabilities are quite expensive they have um like the Braille displays and and the software that's specially created they you know they they run in the I think $6 700 range so for in we have actually now added to our repertoire of supported players uh a new player which you are seeing in my video um and this one is called the envoy connect it's a lowcost player that costs around $100 it um I think is a very interesting middle Choice uh it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the daisy players um in such as speed control of the audio or you cannot actually really navigate in an hierarchical you don't see the different levels and sublevels you see every single uh track of the book at the same level so it has some limitations but it also has some great advantages it integrates very well with h it doesn't have on its own access to Internet but you can download uh software called CA connect that uh we have developed and it's available free on our website and in fact if you're interested you could probably download it even without having the player and play around with it because what this software does is um it allows you to manage books on the player it connects very smoothly to uh your account or the Patron's account whoever it's registered in and you can also because it's such a small player um we also uh let people send it in by mail and have it reloaded uh by the Sila personnel and then we send it back so for people that are used to always uh receiving their books by mail as CDs they can do that as well with this player um so it's an interesting hybrid I would say between a low technology Solution that's more low cost um but it also still has the accessibility of each button is um clearly marked and uh you can recognize them by touch as well and you get audio feedback um for every operation of the player as you shall see in a moment um so I will demonstrate the player a little bit I will press uh the power and play button which you can see it's the biggest button and the first time I touched this player I immediately it was clear to me that this will be the button to press so I'm going to hold it [Music] down okay so we shall now hear the a tree is a plant by Clyde Robert baa book number DV 57883 copyright 196 unfortunately I cannot stop that beginning so every time you start the player it will play the few first few seconds of the last book we were reading and uh this uh happens so now if I move over above the play button we have the bookshelf button and this button if we press it repeatedly it will cycle through all the books that are available on the player I should note that we have 8 GB of storage here so there is plenty of room especially for audio and you can even add an SD card Envoy connect quick start guide last updated 2020 a tree is a plant by I just have two books here book number7 we have listen to this again um cy6 right thank you so um the if I had more books of course it would cycle through all the books and then start over again um I will now demonstrate for example the the sleep button or if like I can even hear the battery status which normally you would need to have a site to watch the LED status of the battery but if I hold down the back button I will hear three beeps which tell me that the battery is high so in other words every operation is is accessible I will now start the playback and demonstrate you can play and pause and I will skip forward by pressing quickly the forward button and it will jump to the next section this apple tree came from a seed I will go back a tree is the big Library of Congress annotation I'm pressing the PL now I'm at the very beginning ba I press the pause and play button again and so this demonstrated I actually navigated backwards I could also go forwards the same way I will demonstrate now that you can also uh fast forward within a section and I will start playback and you will hear a bunch of beeps every beep is uh 30 seconds of that indicates that we skipped 30 seconds a tree is a plant by Library of Congress and from the book jacket we just skipped a minute um so this gives you an idea about how this book Works actually should this player works so uh it it is an interesting intermediary solution not as advanced as the full-fledged Daisy players but certainly a great portable option that integrates in a low Tech you know you need relatively few uh technical knowledge to um connect to ca so it very smooth integration now I will um mention a bit about another new technology that is emerging uh for accessible reading and this one is really an adaptation of a technology that is a mainstream technology and we're talking about the voice activated devices such as the homepod the Alexa devices I hope nobody has any Amazon speakers lying around or the Google Device and um these offer great potential because they are user friendly you can talk to them as you so you don't need to remember any complicated shortcut keys or also for uh people with uh motor limitations uh it is a great tool and already in fact Alexa has good integration with Audible and other um I mean actually mainly with audible because it's a Amazon's platform of choice for for commercial audiobooks um but it also allows uh libraries such as Sila to build their own skills uh that allow delivery of um audio books uh and other accessible material to but mainly audiobooks whether it's human narrated or or text to speech some of them um so CA is currently working on the skill we it's not yet currently Avail available that was the an connect turning off uh it's not currently available but uh we think and we've heard from other libraries that the adoption rate can be quite High uh and people enjoy uh being able to listen to their books on their smart devices on their smart voice activated devices smart speakers now I would like to discuss another um aspect of mainstream technology and these are the accessible reading apps um once a device is made accessible such as you have seen with a computer with a screen reader or similarly with voiceover and in fact I encourage you to experiment with if you ever want to find out more because all the smartphones and tablets have some form of screen reader and accessibility adaptations baked in a note of caution if you do try to use voice over or talk B for and Android make sure that you know how to turn it off because all the gestures that you would normally use are changed so you don't want to be stuck in limbo um so once we make the device accessible then we have the option of using all sorts of apps um this is a solution that of course might require a steeper learning curve for your patrons but it also has more rewards because once you know how to use a smart device you it opens other Avenues uh you have accessible apps such as of course audible or even Apple Books or or Kindle work quite well um assuming the books are I mean I have downloaded a Kindle book that just was scanned images and that was absolutely unusable so the books have to be in ePub or some other accessible format that Charmaine mentioned but it probably epop or basically it cannot be scanned images uh otherwise those apps will not work for you uh but the two most and then there are the specialized apps that read the daisy format which is a specialized format for uh that we discussed before so they would be um the equivalent basically of the daisy players except that they are apps on our smart devices I will now um demonstrate there are two main ones that are very popular uh are easy reader and voice stream reader uh each has their advantages easy reader is free U and it has good integration with CA it makes it very easy to search books right within the app and to consult your virtual bookshelf where you can place in advance or you the librarian or any support person can place books for you in that bookshelf and we have easy access to that bookshelf within the app it reads uh Daisy books whether it's text with synthesized speech or audio books that have their own human narrated uh books and I will show it to you a little later the other great alternative is voice dream reader uh it doesn't integrate as easily with um with CA you would basically you can still add books right to the app but you would need to navigate on a web browser like interface and you have to log in put in your user a password every time so it is less user friendly in terms of adding books from CA but it has as you will see um a very elegant interface I would say it's in some ways more robust it has very interesting uh adaptations for font and uh focus and focused reading for people with uh dyslexia and other Related Disorders so these are the two one uh it is also I should say that voice stream is not free it is available um now only by subscription it was a recent change and um I wasn't able to find out exactly how much it costs because I already have the app so every time I try to check it uh it tells me that I already have the apps but it is I think it's around $60 $70 a year um and all these apps of course allow uh people to read using their bra displays as well as a side note I will now demonstrate the easy reader app um let me try to stop the video oh okay speech on active speaker Avatar white captions recall share but chat but raise my hand a participant stop my video button I will now share my screen so I can demonstrate the use of the easy reader app okay you should now be seeing my zoom uh screen I will open the easy reader app app switcher voice stream easy reader AC picture and picture displayed easy reader 257 yes please let me know if there's any problem with seeing the app um so easy reader note that I'm using voiceover so all my gestures are modified in order to select anything I will double tap and I can swipe left and right to cycle through the different controls on the screen um I will demonstrate the integration with CA video video post book information side menu side menu button side menu my books but manage CA Library so right away I have put it at the top waiting for Ellipsis CA Library log out but direct to player Bookshop it remembers my login info which makes it much easier for a patron that doesn't need to worry about remembering their credentials direct to player bookshelf um um I could use log out search or browse search or browse search or browse keyword search I could uh ask a keyboard search and I would need to type in a term Browse by category also Browse by category Browse by category Canadian author fiction you know so I would I could double author loading Ellipsis you would see all sorts of hunting by stars so I could now double tap and borrow a book for example return to J White o return to Oak return toor button so I will double tap on borrow please wait and the book should be added download button uh it should be added to my bookshelf begins during World War open a stream button back button I will go back don't want to start downloading the return to um I will return to the books that I already we have downloaded going up back back button back button side menu side menu button side menu Canadian authors fiction my books but book please wait empty list walk n Michelle Jean okay so these are books that I have already downloaded on my device new Pati patience dialog Silo W okay here we go loading Ellipsis please wait alert CA close button oh this one didn't want this is why I mean sometimes it it it works it's quite elegant with the interface but a little information Button book book information button V om loading would be a Pity the title is being processed and will be a close button yeah Li try another one it might be in though okay well access 15 seconds 2 minutes so as you can see we have uh we can control the speed um we have different buttons for navigation navigation settings button next book default button play previous book book navigation button I could press show all the differents level one 55 minutes 39 play okay I paused and I can change the Speed 2 minutes 15c language default words care audio heading one audio Speed 2 225% okay that's very fast 125% so you can see I can control the speed um and then resume playback so this gives you a sense of how the easy reader app works I'm not sure how we're doing with time I could give you a quick uh the advantage maybe I I don't think we'll have time to show you the The Voice stream reader app what that one does very well it has um the controls are nicely present represented for people with using voiceover so the play button if you swipe on it it also becomes a speed control button so in other words you don't have to go and find many different buttons one button performs multiple functions which can be useful or confusing depending on the type of uh Patron you're dealing with uh it has great uh you can annotate you can select text export highlight a little bit like you would do in the read and write um app you can touch the screen you can turn if you don't have voice over enabled you can enable a finger reading so that you can touch a word and have it read out loud for you so again people with learning disabilities can take advantage of those kind of features I should mention that there is a speechify app that is popular for people using dyslexia it is also a I don't know it as well because I haven't tried it using voiceover but uh it is also a subscription app so this gives you a bit of an overview of how one could use accessible reading apps uh specialized accessible reading apps on your a smart device smart tablet or phone moving on I will now uh talk to you a little bit about um people with physical challenges and we can have a look at what kind of adaptations they use in order to have access to print so first of all um like we said of course the voice activated devices screen broadcasting oh what's happening here live broadcast okay button okay image 3 seven of 18 so use theor to access 15 seconds phone um okay so we could there are modified keyboards and in fact one of the things that you probably already might have encountered by accident um we have the sticky keys for people that have trouble pressing multiple keys at once um on your computer if you press the shift key multiple times in Windows it will offer to activate this function that instead of having to press let's say alt control delete all at once you could press them one at a time and um so this way you get around the limitation or the the challenge of pressing multiple Keys that's why they're called sticky keys um you have modified keyboards that uh can suit people's needs they can be either larger or adapted to being used with one hand we can um use handheld switches um that can be connected either to your computer or to your tablet or phone uh they are called switches and they can be adapted to be activated with various uh body parts parts and um you can even use what is called Sip and puff technology so you can have a a type of switch that you can it's kind of like a straw and you can inhale or exhale and this is how you move um how you move the uh activate the switch left and right as or back and forth back and forward um you have voice dictation of course uh we all know the the dict to some extent but there are you know Dragon natural speaking which is and also voice control on the iPhone and uh it's equivalent on uh Android that allow you to um have uh to execute commands and select uh different controls or apps or icons on the screen using only your voice it has a bit a bit of a learning curve but basically it allows you to use any app um without needing to touch your device um eye gaze technology so ey tracking is also a good option for people um to control their devices and um so these are several adaptations that can be used to read accessibly um we have here finally further resource resources I know we covered a lot of U material so you can come back and have a look in more in depth s has has a great page about compatible devices and where it gives you an overview of uh of all the different types of devices that can be used with the ca materials we have um CA accessible formats page which goes over the various formats that we have uh discussed today be it Daisy epab Braille uh and others and also gives you an overview of which devices can be used to read these formats um we have an interesting research with about accessible publishing resources so um guidelines about how to create um what we call born accessible books and guidelines for publishing books that are access accessible um the same with inclusive Poss uh publishing and there also book share it classifies various tools uh for um various disabilities and they have ratings for usability for various apps um so I hope this uh gives you um a sense of what is available and I will pass it over to Jessica and looking forward to hearing your questions
2023-12-25 18:44
