One of my favorite sessions to present at education conferences is about removing barriers to student learning. There are many decisions we make, consciously and unconsciously, that impact the learning environment for students. As students have a wide range of needs and learning characteristics, sometimes we are not always aware of how these decisions are truly impacting our students. (I go over this more in one of my previous posts – Seeing the Barriers of Instructional Design and I even mention the great Ted Talk by Todd Rose about the Myth of Average which is a must-see.)
This unawareness of the impacts of our instructional design is largely due to the fact of how many decisions a teacher has to make every day in the classroom and how much the students vary in our classrooms. We may not be aware of the impact of those decisions on each learner but once we are aware, it is up to us to make those changes to improve the learning opportunities for students. I plan on going more in-depth around these issues throughout a series of blog posts this summer and wanted to start with one that I think is most impactful, the decisions that impact how easily students can use text-to-speech tools in the classroom.
There are many learners who can benefit from the use of text-to-speech tools. Students with forms of dyslexia, learners with vision impairments, learners who are learning a new language, as well as many learners for whom hearing the text read aloud can be more useful than just visually reading the text. Text-to-speech tools used to be very costly or hard to install on devices but as the technology has changed and accessibility tools have become built-in to every operating system, they are much easier and more accessible to learners than ever before. Even though these tools are more accessible, they are not always used by those learners who can best benefit from them and there are many reasons why. Our goal as educators is to remove those barriers so that the learners can use these tools as best as they can to help them learn as best as they can.
Let’s go over the basics of text-to-speech tools: They are tools that will read out loud the words on a device. The voices used by text-to-speech tools used to sound very robotic but they have come a long way and there are many natural voices you can use. Text-to-speech tools often allow you to adjust the voice being used, the speed the words are spoken, the pitch of the voice, and even various other characteristics of the voices. You do not even need to install additional programs for text-to-speech but you will find better options in the paid programs as opposed to just the free or already installed options. Here are the basics for the options already installed to the main operating systems.
Since most schools use Chromebooks in the classroom, at least most of the schools that I have worked with and have seen, I will focus on additional tools for them. There are many Chrome Extensions that can be installed that either focus on text-to-speech or have it as a main component.
- Snap and Read – This Chrome Extension is one that my own district has paid for over the last number of years for all of our students. It is a very powerful text-to-speech tool and excels in using the OCR (optical character recognition) ability to pull text off of images. The interface is simple and while it can do some translation, note-taking, and other abilities, the text-to-speech feature is the main feature.
- Read and Write for Google Chrome – This is another commonly used text-to-speech tool but it has many other features that go well beyond text-to-speech. This is also another paid tool that has some free features but the best features are ones you have to pay for. The other features can help many readers who can benefit from easy to use tools to adjust font, add definitions and explanations, word predictions, picture dictionaries, ….
- Helperbird – This is another paid tool but you get a lot more than just text-to-speech. Pretty much has every accessibility tool you would want and ways to organize them to put the most used ones at the top. I have used this in a previous district and was happy with how it worked, most importantly how much the company focused on schools and trying to constantly improve the tool for students.
- Speechify – This is another Chrome Extension that I have used and was impressed with the AI-powered text-to-speech voices. If you want a very natural-sounding voice, this is definitely a tool I would look at.
There are probably many tools that I am missing but these are the most commonly used ones that I have seen being used in classrooms beyond the built-in text-to-speech tools. Chrome Extensions are useful since you can easily push them out for students and they do not need to do anything to get access to them. Getting the tools onto student computers is just the first step but there are barriers in place that keep students from easily using text-to-speech tools. Some of these barriers are common to many of the accessibility tools out there but some of them are created by instructional decisions the teacher has made. Again, only when we are aware of the barriers can we start to remove them and this will help all students, not just those students who we are focusing on. The following are some things we can do to remove these barriers.
- Model Using Text-to-Speech tools and normalize their use
- There is a stigma around using text-to-speech tools to read in the classroom. There is a stigma around using any tool that shows you are not “normal” and the more work we can remove this stigma, the more students we can help. By using text-to-speech tools ourselves, we can better show that these tools are useful and can help everyone. We can show that it is not weird to use these tools and you are not different for using them. As a young student who had to wear a hearing aid in order to hear the teacher well, I know this stigma really well. That little piece of technology made me feel different and became a focal point for any student that wanted to pick on me. It was an easy target for a taunt or comment because it was not “normal” and made me stand out. The teacher can remove this stigma by making sure that students know there are many ways that people learn and these tools are helpful. If a teacher makes a comment about the tool in a negative way though, even in a different class, this will make it much harder for the student to use the tool. Make sure that teachers do not see these tools as a crutch but as a necessary tool to best learn as they can.
- Let students play with the tools
- Text-to-speech tools have many options for the voices being used and the characteristics of the voices. Some tools even highlight the text as it is read aloud and these may be more beneficial than just an audio track. Students should try out all of the options to find the voice that sounds best to them. If they are not given the chance to adjust the tool to best fit them as a learner, the tool will not be as effective. I use the word play because it should be fun to mess around with the tool in order to really understand how it can be adjusted so that they understand how to adjust it best for themselves.
- Give students easy access to accessible text
- This is a critical point because it doesn’t matter how great the tool is if we can’t use it easily. Accessible text is text can simply be thought of as text that can be highlighted with a cursor, text that can be adjusted, text that is more than just an image of text. Many copiers used in schools can scan a paper document and email the teacher a digital copy but that digital copy is usually just an image of the text. While this may be digital, it is not accessible and will not work with many text-to-speech tools. Tools like Snap and Read can use the OCR feature to pull the text but this creates errors more often than just using accessible text. If you do not have a good digital copy of your text, now may be a great time to find a better resource. The worst thing we can do is put it on the learner to find a digital copy or digitize it themselves. If we want students to easily be able to read the text we give them, we should make sure they have easy access to both printed and accessible digital text. This isn’t a paper vs digital thing, this is a digital and paper thing. Give all students access to both so that they do not have to do extra steps to get to the resource that best fits their needs.
- Do not make it hard to use headphones
- I have seen a recent push to ban headphones in classes when just a few years ago they were part of every back-to-school shopping list. Text-to-speech tools work best when the learner can use headphones to listen to the text being read aloud so they do not disturb others around them. The more steps a student has to take in order to just use headphones when they are using text-to-speech tools to read text, the more likely they are to not use the tool at all and they will not learn as best as they can. If you are worried about what a student might be listening to when wearing headphones, you can just listen to the headphones and when students make mistakes, because they are human and young, you can help them learn how to correct those mistakes. We should make sure that students can use headphones when they are using a text-to-speech tool to read without needing to go through many extra steps, this should not require an IEP or 504 plan, this should be something all students have access to.
There are many instructional decisions that we make as educators that may be made with the best intentions, but have negative unintended consequences for some learners. Once we are aware of how those instructional decisions make it harder for some students to learn as best as they can, we need to do the work necessary to remove those barriers. Not every student learns the same, has the same background, has the same access to resources and support, or even reacts the same to the instruction we implement. The more we become aware of these differences and how we can adjust our instructional decisions to best help all students, the better. The more barriers we can remove, the more students can learn and that should always be our goal.
Donovanscience 