eBooks
An e-book (electronic book) is the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. Such documents are usually read on personal computers, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book readers or e-book devices. Using an ereader with text to speech software can make a wide range of books accessible to our students, it can also help the student to improve their reading fluency.
Other advantages of these books over conventional ones are the enhancements they allow; definition of words, links to related material and the reader can search the text using search words.
The Blio e-reader is a free download from
http://www.blio.com/ this is an ereader which allows the student to access public domain books in their original format, it also has an audio option which works for most of the books. Blio is a free download.
Text to Speech
Another way of supporting reading development is by using text to speech software. For a student to use such software on their home computer they will have to purchase it. In this example we look at Text Aloud which is one of the best and widely used text to speech programs.
Text Aloud from
Nextup.com converts text to speech allowing the user to hear a document being read. The effectiveness of this product depends on the quality of the voice used. There are default Windows voices on most computers but these will not be of a high enough quality to be effective with Text Aloud.
Better quality voices are available from a number of sources including: AT&T Natural voices, acapela and Realspeak.
Using TextAloud
Text Aloud can be downloaded from
NextUp.com . Once downloaded the program can be run by clicking on the desktop icon:
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