Did you know text to speech can be the key to helping dyslexic students? you need to keep reading this post!
Over 1 billion people worldwide encounter barriers when trying to read and understand content online. And today, Inclusion is the most crucial factor in educational challenges and in content creation.
Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that mainly causes problems with reading, writing and spelling. However, unlike a learning disability, intelligence isn’t affected.
Audiovisual content is the key on platforms like YouTube, but occasionally you need the audio version of a certain document, which is where Text-To-Speech tool shines. With it you can turn any document, even if it’s long or an ebook into speech.
Text-to-speech solutions provide digital accessibility to populations with learning and speech disabilities, visual impairments, and low literacy challenges across devices and platforms, so your message is clear and comprehensible to everyone.
What’s text to speech?
Text-to-Speech (TTS) is a system that converts normal language text into speech. It’s a technology that enables text to be converted into speech sounds imitative of the human voice.
A Text-To-Speech solution, in addition to being able to complete long texts or documents in under an hour, has the potential to become the most essential tool for the education of children who have dyslexia.
The quality and quantity of the audio vary, however with the recent technological advances you can get TTs tools with natural voices that don’t sound robotic. The perfect one is Woord.
Why Woord?
Woord is a free online TTS that has a number of useful features. It is available in over 50 languages, including several English dialects, Portuguese dialects, and Spanish dialects. You can also select a male, female, or gender-neutral voice. All of these features are available for free, allowing you to test the service before investing in the premium version.
The free edition includes premium voices, a Chrome plugin, an SSML editor, an MP3 download, and up to 20,000 characters per month. You can also change the speed and format of the voice with this software.
Woord´s vocal characteristics allow you to use it in a variety of situations. You can use Woord´s Text-to-Speech (TTS) functionality to create applications that assist people with reading difficulties, such as those used in E-learning and education.
Woord, as previously mentioned, can be used to assist the blind and visually impaired in consuming digital information such as eBooks and newspapers, but it can also be used in a variety of devices such as set-top boxes, smartwatches, tablets, and smartphones.
How to use it?
Woord‘s interface is designed in a simple way to be intuitive for the user. With these simple steps you will be able to generate quality audio:
1- In the format you prefer, write or upload the content you want to convert to speech (it can be an image, PDF, text file, blog, or a variety of other formats).
2- Select the language, voice gender (male or female), and pace. (From within the PDF, you can also choose where to begin playing.)
3- You can listen to or download your audio recording as an MP3 file online.
Also published on Medium.