MomOfABunch Posted April 27, 2015 Share Posted April 27, 2015 What are the options for read aloud apps or settings? I have an iPad, so what is available there? But I could also get a kindle if it's really that much better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OneStepAtATime Posted April 27, 2015 Share Posted April 27, 2015 I have both. DS loves his Kindle. Loves it. He has headphones and can be listening to his book while he does other things without it bothering DD, who may be working on something right beside him. Audio quality is good. The device is incredibly easy for him to carry around the house (we got him a rugged case since he tends to drop things) since he can carry it with one hand. Lots and lots of book options. I like the IPad. It is very useful. For book reading and listening, though, I prefer a Kindle. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timberly Posted April 28, 2015 Share Posted April 28, 2015 . 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MomOfABunch Posted April 29, 2015 Author Share Posted April 29, 2015 Thanks! What if I want to scan in text, a worksheet or something, to have it read aloud? How do I do that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FairProspects Posted April 30, 2015 Share Posted April 30, 2015 Thanks! What if I want to scan in text, a worksheet or something, to have it read aloud? How do I do that? Do you have a device with a camera like an iPhone? The Prizmo app will read aloud from a picture of the document you take with your phone. Otherwise this technology is pretty hard to get. There is a speak it plug in for Google Chrome browsing, but I don't know how to scan and get a worksheet read aloud. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heathermomster Posted April 30, 2015 Share Posted April 30, 2015 Check out features of OCR scans. OCR software is a useful Accessibility or Ease of Access tool. Vision impaired PC users can scan books, magazines, incoming faxes, or other documents into word processing programs to be used in conjunction with a computer voice-over utility. DS uses text to voice for books that are text to speech enabled with his older Kindle. The Learning Ally app is awesome on a IPad/IPod. We use the Voice Dream app on both the IPod/IPad for txt and doc files and connects easily with Bookshare and Project Gutenbeg. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPan Posted May 10, 2015 Share Posted May 10, 2015 Voice Dream can read any pdf, and Turboscan (a free app for your phone) can turn anything into a pdf. I have voicedream on my ipad and turboscan on my phone. If I were more brilliant I'd put Turboscan on my ipad and then it would all be in one device to try, hmmm. Maybe I can give that a whirl and see if it works. Seems like it should. I know voicedream reads pdfs well, because dh has used it for some really crunchy ones that were just horrible, with marks in the margins, etc. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPan Posted May 10, 2015 Share Posted May 10, 2015 Well that was an interesting adventure. An item scanned with Turboscan and turned into a pdf, shared to dropbox, then from dropbox opened in Voice Dream did NOT read. VD said it needed OCR. So maybe the pdf dh was given by the professor was scanned with a device using OCR software? So then I tried CamScanner, which was an app I had gotten for free at some point. When you scan with CamScanner, you can hit OCR at the bottom and it will let you generate that, open in dropbox, etc. These apps do not seem to want to play directly with VD, so you have to go through the intermediary of Dropbox (or Evernote, OneDrive, whatever). VD plays nicely with those major sharing apps. So once you get it into your intermediate/cloud app, you just share it from there to VD and it works. Now I tried to samples, one of straight text (ds' psych report actually, lol) and the other of a workbook with a mixture of text and images (a Kumon coin workbook). The straight text worked great, but it had numerous errors in the workbook scan, left out the imagines entirely (so that literally just had the text), and then VD was unable, totally unable to read it. As in it didn't even work. So that does not bode well. I think if you want something that has a heavy mixture of text and images you'll do better to use something where apple's voiceover is reading it. That means an ibook, an etext you purchase through itunes, or ... Apple's voice over can be turned on to read the screen. I haven't tried it, but I *assume* it can read books and whatever is on the screen when you're in iTunes. That would take a little bit of play to figure out if voiceover plus an OCR scan file works better. If you buy a pdf that was generated by the publisher (as opposed to an optical scan), you have the text embedded for the reader to recognize. I think at that point any of the reader software (VD, voiceover, whatever) can read it. So getting your workbooks that way is going to be the better bet. Not only is scanning the page as an OCR file problematic, but it's slow, so slow you wouldn't want to do it for a whole workbook. You might write the publisher, explain the disability, and see if they can offer you a pdf version of whatever you're wanting to buy. Some of the major publishers now offer their texts in alternative formats. BJU, for instance, has e-texts. I don't know if anyone is putting workbooks out as pdfs. Math Mammoth is. Those should work. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MomOfABunch Posted May 15, 2015 Author Share Posted May 15, 2015 Woa...information overload! Ok, I'll give a few of these a try. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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