Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 23rd September, 2011
A common question we get from staff, parents and students is "Can I use speech recognition software to dictate my answers into the computer in an examination?" and so SQA funded us to spend some time trying to answer this. We've written a report with the results of the tests we've carried out on...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 19th September, 2011
TextHelp, publishers of Read and Write Gold and PDFaloud, have decided that they will no longer sell PDFaloud as a standalone program. Since 2008, Scottish schools have been able to buy a site licence for PDFaloud for £295 from Learning and Teaching Scotland, under a special licencing deal....
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 12th September, 2011
Earlier this year Stuart and I were videoed finding, using and making books in accessible formats, and the videos are now available on the Education Scotland web site. They provide a quick and reasonably (we think!) straightforward introduction to Books for All, and you can download the videos and...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 14th June, 2011
Well the votes are in and we can now reveal that the winner is....... SPA!
We emailed samples of six male voices out to people who had downloaded Heather, to key contacts in local authorities, FE colleges and Universities, to ICTSLS, members of SICTDG, members of Augmentative Communication in Pr...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 31st May, 2011
The Kindle for PC Accessibility Plugin is now available for UK customers (and also for users in Australia, Canada and the U.S.). Kindle for PC is free software for reading Kindle eBooks on your Windows PC. The main feature of the new plugin is a text-to-speech tool which means that blind, visually...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 30th March, 2011
Adobe have just released new versions of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro. Adobe Reader is the free program that most people use for reading PDF files, such as the Hodder Gibson textbooks that we distribute for pupils who cannot read the paper versions, or the SQA digital exam papers. Acrobat Pr...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 28th March, 2011
We have added a new section to the CALL Digital Exam Papers web site, with information on how to use the SQA digital exam papers. There's also a new page where you can download user guides and information sheets on using and making interactive resources in PDF.
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 21st March, 2011
Both Perfect Papers and P&N Publications are now supplying digital prelims with answer boxes - the same format and style that is used for the SQA digital question papers. This should make it much easier for schools who use these commercial prelim papers to provide them for students who need ad...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 7th March, 2011
We are very pleased to announce that the Scottish Government has awarded us funding to work with CereProc to develop a male Scottish computer voice: a 'brother for Heather'. The funding will also pay for a licence for the entire public sector in Scotland, so that the voice can be used by school-ag...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 28th February, 2011
Although Heather is pretty good at pronouncing most words correctly, there will be some terms which are not spoken correctly.
You can use the PDFaloud Pronunciation Dictionary to fix this but this involves checking which words are not spoken correctly and adding them to the dictionary one at a ...
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