Bringing Voice to ePubs and Documents: ReadSpeaker within the Canvas LMS

Alright. I'm Kathy Wood. Just, you know, obviously, we've had some discussions while we were getting this, started. I am from Georgia if you can't tell the accent. Alongside me is Ginger Dewey. She is our implementation guru.

So if you use Read speaker, she is your your person to go to. We have free support for the life of the license, free professional development, all the good stuff. So she's kind of that guru. Paul Stisser, the one that likes to talk sports. He is our director, of, sales in North America and also kind of our business development, person.

And in the back, just hanging out as Clarence. Clarence handles, our southeast region in sales. So he would be the one to talk to about any type of pricing, in that respect. And Paul handles a lot of different other areas, California, Texas, all that kind of stuff. Oh, that one.

Okay. Perfect. Alright. That's the screen's not great. So tell me about Read speaker.

At the very top, you're gonna see a listen button. Okay. That's as simple as it is. All those students need to do is click that listen button, okay, and the little hamburger allows will drop down for all kinds of settings. The settings are unique to the student and the device.

Why is that important? Because I learn differently than you do drives my husband crazy. I am a visual learner. If he's like, let's do this. I'm like, well, what will that look like? You know, let's put a rock wall there. Well, I mean, what are you talking about? Big rock, small rock, black rock, brown rock, whatever.

We have over two hundred and forty five voices and over sixty eight different languages. We are a voice technology company as well. If you've heard of Sonos speakers or Spotify, guess what? They use our voices. If anybody watched breaking bad, we cloned one of the voices for Sono speakers. It was a Espinito? He's now their voice.

Yep. So, in terms of of just telling you about that, we own the entire process of that voice. So customization is very easy. If you use acronyms at your school and you want it read out every time that acronym is thrown out there, we can customize that stuff. And because we use voice talent for our voices, they're more relatable.

Okay? And we're constantly always improving those voices. Used by over fifteen thousand clients globally. We believe in that UDL model of helping everyone, not just a few. So when we think about in our higher eds, maybe at an institution, five percent are identified as needing accommodation, typically eighteen to twenty four percent of those students use the tools provided because they're there. Easy to use and easy to implement.

If it's not easy to use, students are gonna use it. If it's not to implement. Guess what your Ellis said, LSMS admins aren't gonna implement it. And most importantly, accessibility tools, It's not just about text to speech. It's about those accessibility tools and working with your other software solutions that you're using like Respondus.

Honorlock, Proctorio, all of those. So what are the benefits of text to speech? Obviously, in grooving all of these different things, word recognition, information recall, reading comprehension, helping those student state peer level. Let's talk to our k twelve people. My husband is k five principal. He's been in public education for twenty eight years.

Okay? When we think about our students and we think about those students have to be pulled out. Okay? It doesn't really help a lot of self confidence because they're being single out. Okay? If we can provide them software that allows them to kind of learn alongside their peers. Guess what? That helps their their self confidence. Okay? Ease of implementation.

And Paul's gonna talk a little bit about this when he when he jumps to another slide, but literally for those that that have to do the implementation of the third party software. Guess what? It's easy as a JavaScript and your themes. Okay? And we are gonna talk a little bit about our other product tech stayed. That we typically do a little bit of bundling for, that, you know, again, it's about customizing it for your institution. Now UDEL.

I heard some people that went and came and visited the booth. They were like, UDL. Okay. If you're not familiar with UDL, what is it does anybody know what UDL stands for? The universal design for learning. Okay.

So that means, you know, implementing something that that, you know, again, can be customized to that that learner's, preferences. So on this screen, you see an image, let's call them a professor or or a teacher. And he's telling all these different students, you know, for a fair selection, they've gotta take that same exam, climb the tree. I don't know about you. I don't think that fish is gonna make it.

Okay. Again, here's another example of that UDL. You've got a faculty member shoveling snow. Okay? And he's got stairs and he's got a ramp. What happens if he shovels the ramp? Everybody benefits at the same time.

Okay? So, again, we think about leveling the playing field for all learners. Alright. I'm gonna hand it over to ginger. Do we? And she's going to or Paul, do you wanna talk about the ease of implementation? No. Okay.

Ginger. But let me just speak back on the world traveling. I'm looking at That's also known as the curb cut effect, fancy terminology that, that, you know, people like to use. So, again, know, these things that were initially designed for people with mobility issues, such as the elevator, and and these ramps, everybody typically take part of I know that I am not lugging my suitcase up the stairs, tomorrow at the the airport. Alright.

Ginger's going to show you just how easy it is to implement read speaker, and then we're gonna move over to some of the tools in the demo. And I am a memes freak, and I know that drives Paul crazy sometimes and that, but you will see some memes in this. I'm so sorry. Alright. And to do this, holding a microphone on a touch mouse is going to be interesting.

First off, it is very easy to implement. It's about six lines of JavaScript. And I'm gonna go into the themes area. Okay. I've gone into my admin account, and I'm on settings.

So I now go up to themes. And when I click on my current theme, upload, and right here, you're going to select your JavaScript file. Then you will do a view and a save that quick. And it helps when you're on the admin account were you on a student account? No. I was supposed to be on my admin account, but it wasn't going to the right place.

So that's how quick it is. We can do an installation in under five minutes. The longest thing is pasting the JavaScript onto a notepad or plain text thing and saving it. The rest is like this. Questions.

You're using. Thank you. Other types of publications that are utilizing that they're using our our platform. And also when it comes to acronyms abbreviations, your preference of the way something is pronounced. And I always use this as an example.

And if you've ever been in one of my presentations, I apologize for hearing it twice. I grew up in Western New York, Our beach was called Charlot Beach. Okay? Everywhere else in the world is called Charlotte. Okay. But ours was pronounced lot.

So when you heard something on the radio, you had to hear that, or you knew it was out of town. Okay. It was an out of town it's that regionalization that allows you to do that in that pronunciation. Also, during corona, with the word coronavirus, you could see different, companies in Texas speech providers or Texas speech leasers who are using it and it wasn't pronouncing it right. I will admit ours did not pronounce it right the first day, but traditionally in a pronunciation or a dictionary correction, it's something we did in the twenty four hours and we pushed it out.

And not only did we push it out, but we pushed it out across, you know, the see different languages that that we're supporting. So when a student need to hear it, mainly a nursing student or a medical student who may have English as a second language, and they're asked to participate in a discussion. How are they going to feel comfortable with that? The accuracy of the voice supports that. Yes, ma'am. Did you have a question? Okay.

Alright. Okay. I'm gonna click on the tab on the left. And it flies up to the top. I can drag it wherever I want.

By click listen, it's gonna play the whole page. But I can also highlight some text, and click listen from the pop up or the button. Your institution most likely has other learner supports available. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of pastel colors. If you saw me yesterday at the booth, you saw my neon orange shirt.

So I want my settings to have more contrast. I'll keep the blue word, but I want a bright yellow sentence. If I was color blind, I could change the underline and use it. While I'm here, I wanna look at my reading speed. Right now, it's at one hundred percent.

I can move it up to one hundred and five, which is what I listen at. That one's works good for me. Now I'm gonna close it. And just so we can see the exact same sentence, In a new look. Your institution most likely has other learner supports available.

How many people like that voice? Okay. Alright. That's great feedback. It really is. Alright.

I'm gonna change to another one. Will listen to another sentence. Come on. Okay. I got most of the word in there.

Each person has different learning preferences. Do you like that one better? Well, for our k twelve who might be working with young children. Students can use tax day to prove papers before going to tutoring. So you see, we have lots of different voices. I believe there are fourteen English voices that we have, and we also have Australian English and British English because a lot of students get tired.

And when they get tired, they need to change it up. And there's something about hearing crocodile dundee read to you. Just works. Alright. You see that we can read pages and we know Microsoft immersive reader reads pages, but let's go to an assignment.

And I'm gonna choose this top one. And highlight it. Click listen. I could have just hit listen from the top. Find an article on text to speech.

Summarize the article. Provide the link to the article as well as the summary. So you see, even though we've changed to a different page, different type part of canvas, I can still read it. Do you want me go on to quizzes now or hold it? Handles alt text. It reads the alt text.

Embedded page. Are you talking about bringing publisher information into it as a deep link? Coming from Publisher. I think that's something that I'm gonna talk about, as we go along. Okay. Let's go to a quiz.

Now, I'm in as a student, and One of the things I'm gonna go to I want one with more than one question. We'll resume it. Alright. I've got a multiple choice and I've got a true false up here. Now, When I click on the hamburger, right down here, there is no download to MP three.

And I'll go back to a page here in a few minutes and show you that the download to MP three is there. If I highlight something and I don't get my dictionary popping up, you'll notice dictionary and translate are not underneath the listen button and they are on a regular page. In quizzes, we remove those for academic integrity. Okay? Alright. If I wanna listen, which web reader tool allows you to make the font larger.

And I think I want to use my crocodile Dundee voice. I hope he's on here. Not noticing, you know, all these different languages and things when we think about, the the languages we offer, if you have content in a different language, that's when you would choose that that language. So you you have a Spanish, written document. Like, at my son's school, one side is English, one side's Spanish, right? Cause we have a huge Hispanic population where I live.

So if you think about having, you know, a French document, Spanish document, Ukraine, document. You would choose that voice. And it's gonna be authentic, Spanish speaking, authentic French it's not gonna be me trying to be like, right? So think about that too. Just that's the only thing I remember from French class. So just remember too that, you know, again, those voices, it matters.

Right? That dialect matters. So when when you are teaching a Spanish class and you are choosing a Spanish speaking voice that it that it's truly, you know, an authentic voice. So go ahead, ginger. Alright. We don't have Jack in this one So I'm gonna use Bridget, who is our UK voice.

One of them. In large text, Zoom text, enlarged reading, text enlargement. And the question again was which web browser tool makes it easy for you to enlarge the text and that is in large text. Now on the true faults, we could go through with it. We also have a drop down menu that allows us you've seen us look at the settings and the the reading voice, but we have text mode.

And what I would do with text mode is I want this question in it, so I'm going to choose it. I'm going to go to text mode. And now I'm going to set up my text settings I could have done this when I was on my regular settings, but anytime you have a pop up block, you can change the settings right there. I want it to be a little bit bigger. Let's use a plus seven.

Let's get real big. What font do you guys want? Open dyslexic. And what color background do you want? Pink. Alright. Now, I'm going to tell you something I learned last night about dyslexic students.

Talking with a gentleman, he said that he uses Ariel as his font, but he puts it with a character spacing in there, and that's what I just did there. So if he's having to sound out a new word, he's able to sound it out because he can see the individual characters. And that was something I hadn't thought about. Now we can read this, but I wanna show you something else. We can make it larger or smaller.

And being the one who learns differently at my home, daughter, ADD, son ADHD and husband ADHD. I'm the only one that learns differently from them. Now I learned very quickly when the kids were young that they needed to keep their eyes straight to up and down in their reading. If they went left and right, squirrel and they're gone, five minutes later, I've got them back in the bit to understand what they're saying, but this can be narrowed to your eye movement so that they are not going off the edge of it when they're moving their eyes from left to right because all they're doing is going straight down. Now, that's powerful.

I wish we had had this when my kids were little. I would have used it. Alright. You've got a page mask. You could use that you know, that's the standard, cut a hole in a sheet of paper, move it up and down.

We've got those tools. Kathy, do you wanna talk about something else before I go into other things? Again, we, you know, she she mentioned, you know, Paige mask and you know, the you know, we kinda consider those focus tools, right, to help the student focus a little bit better the way, you know, again, that learner preference. I think ginger, the saying is is probably diving into the proctoring. Okay. Just double check.

Alright. Before we dive there, notice I'm now not in a quiz. And I have the download to MP three, and I have the dictionary and translate. And again, when we think about translate, we're thinking about, you know, small chunks of content as well. And when you, you can use, it it works off of Google translator detail.

You get to choose that. Correct, Paul. That's right? Correct. Yeah. And so, you know, understanding that, you know, it's not meant to translate and imagine, you know, a whole a whole page at once.

Right? You have a question? So her question is can we turn the dictionary on for a quiz if a student needs that accommodation? It is on for all quizzes or all for all quizzes. It is not a student by student option. Good touch. Alright. So we've done the the So now doc reader, if ginger, we didn't get we you showed web reader.

You didn't show doc reader. You told me proctor. I'm so sorry. That that's why we have a slide deck to kind of give us structure. We have another question.

Very good question. Alright. I like that question. That's one of my favorites. In settings, and and she's not a plant.

I promise. She's not a plant to ask this question. Because Paul always rolls his eyes at me on this. Right here in settings where the little keyboard is, If you expand this out, you can see it. It's a keyboard and let me make my window bigger.

Does that help? Make it a little bit shorter because it's off the screen what they're looking at. Oops. Let's escape that. Does anybody wanna learn coding today? Oops. Let's see.

Alright. Let me go right here. And get back on my page and not a different page. Yes. To answer the question about keyboard commands, Right here, you choose your own command.

You don't have to remember an access key for your particular browser. You don't like what's there, you click on it, you hit delete, then you hit the space again, and I want it to be control l as my listen, and now it is control l. Those are held in the cookies and cache of that browser's devices browser. So you can set them up to what you like. I'm an old Dalls person, so I use Control L a lot because of the left hand keyboard I've already got as DOS commands.

Now looking at doc reader, I'm gonna go straight to files, and I'm gonna enlarge this screen. Maybe? Okay. I am not a m touch mouse person, and I left my mouse in my hotel room. So I apologize. You maybe can or cannot see, but that is a sheet of paper with a little speaker on it.

That little icon. You can find it here or to the right of the name when you have a file in content. And I'm going to click on the epub because everyone's always amazed, we can read epubs. Now, I can change chapters over here. If this were a document that had headings, I could change by headings and that does not mean make it larger and bolder.

It means use a true heading. Alright? But I'm gonna go into the second book have no idea what this is as we look at it, but I can choose some settings. And I'm going to say that I need that a little bit bigger. So I'm gonna put it in text mode. Okay.

How about that? Better. Thank you. Okay. Now, I'm gonna put it in mode so that I can jack up the font a lot because I don't see the size that I want. And for font size, I'm gonna move it up to a plus four.

And it did not take, Paul. Okay. That Alright. Wait. Go back to lay on hold.

I wonder if it's just a bandwidth issue. There we go. Alright. Now, this takes up too much space. So I'm gonna turn it off.

I can read some, and I'm just gonna highlight some randomly. It might seem to have more convenience, though it come off and otherwise to pass, excellent king, that those which are fruitful in their generations and having themselves the foresight. Okay. So it's reading. Again, I can change the voice.

But here's something that we didn't talk about in web reader that we have in doc reader, and that's a highlighter. How many of you have students that have to take notes? They gotta take them. Right? We have a highlighter. You can choose a color, and highlight something. But that means I gotta go back up here every time.

I can choose a pointer and highlight and choose my color wherever I am. Now I know I'm just randomly highlighting right now, and Whoops. I want red there. I might want to encourage my students to highlight complete sentences because if they were looking at the notes that I've made here, it's not gonna make any sense when it's pulled over to another page. Right? So there is a little bit of a learning curve there to teach the students how to take notes.

But when they're taking notes, with paper pencil, we also encourage them to do complete sentences. Now, what if I'm color blind? I can put borders on it. And I can collect this up, and I have notes. With this, I can do the whole document or just the page. Always do the whole document if you had highlights elsewhere, you wanna capture them.

Color or position, that's your choice showing or not showing the colors and the borders that's also your choice, but if you're using more than one color, I suggest that you keep all the colors you're using, and you only have to have one color clicked over here to collect. And I'm just gonna drop this down on my desktop. I always do suggest that you give it a name that makes sense. And there are the notes. And I probably jacked that up just a little bit too much.

So you see it's that quick. Even with the slow internet we have here, you saw how quickly it did it. Cathy. Let's go ahead and and, transition to and I I know we're running out of time. So, we're gonna I I I do want to So we talked about the study skills.

You know, obviously, you know, those tools help you know, with the the highlighting, that sort of thing. But let's talk about ginger. I want to Hold on. The Honeygreed? Excuse my age. Hold on.

Down here, Kevin. Alright. Just give it a sec. Alright. Perfect.

So these videos are, you know, show read speaker with our proctoring solutions because we have to kind of do a video of those to show. So let's go ahead and watch that. And just click on it. Using Respondus LockDown Browser, Canvas classic quizzes, and REIT speaker is even easier now. Let's launch the Respondus Lockdown Browser.

Log into Canvas. Navigate to your course. Click on a classic quiz. Launch the read speaker web reader by clicking on the tab on the left side of your screen. Position the player where you want it on the screen.

Notice we don't have the download to m p three, translate, or dictionary tools available in quizzes. For our first question, let's use the page mask along with listen, highlight the question and answers, click on the page mask, and then on listen, which of the following tools are found in web reader, group of answer choices, page mask, click and listen, reading voice, reading ruler, settings. We know that web reader has all the tools listed except the reading ruler. Let's look at question two. Let's use text mode.

Highlight the question. Click on text mode. We need to make our selections for how to display the text. Let's use a plus three font size, comic sans font, and black on light pink for our text colors, click play. I use doc reader to read which of the following file types in content.

Group of answer choices, m p three. Office files, d o c x, PPTX, XLSX, PDFs, plain text, and rich text, HTML, m p four. We know the answer is office files, PDFs, plain text, and rich text. For our last question. Let's use enlarged text.

Highlight the question. Toggle the enlarged text on and then click listen I need to use the text aid bookmarklet to read Canvas new quizzes, group of answer choices. True. False. And we know the answer to this question is true.

We now go through the normal submitting process for a quiz. Reading quizzes has never been easier when using read speaker in Canvas classic quizzes. So so, again, that's classic quizzes. And the enlarged text was really cool too because that was not a thing that we have shown, before in this. Paul, you wanted to show about them.

Yeah. I don't know if you need to share the slide. So basically, just to just to sum it up, what we showed was the doc reader. If you're using a McGraw Hill product, you probably have seen that doc reader before. It's because they've rebranded our product.

So it is read speaker's product. You probably see powered by read speaker or or or something of that nature. They're using us and then, of course, they use their text to speech. Where we're going, and I share this one other because this shows new quizzes. Well, I I was gonna talk about the new quizzes.

Okay. So so with the new quizzes, we're asking Canvas to open up their closed source on that. If you're using Respondus, and in Canvas new quizzes, we're gonna be launching a proof of concept. We just agreed with the Respondus to launch that, so we'll be working on that. So that has been that.

Reading the new quizzes, we do have a browser extension, which is really where I come in. So my background, eighteen years as a sped ed teacher, I worked with students who were, on the spectrum, learning different, and I got into business because it was easier. I'm gonna be very honest with you guys. And our our product, you know, that that we've built out. We have our LMS integration.

And what I like to describe is our plus one. Our plus one is our tech state product, which brings the entire, platform together within Canvas for either your sped ed office, your student accessibility office, which traditionally wanna use text aid. So if they're using redirect gold or I forget the other product, or Curzweil. If they're using those products to support content and reading exams, Techstate brings it all together onto one platform. And then, of course, we have our LMS integration.

Tech State is a individual tool that is really cool. It offers the document reading, but it Students can OCR content so they can take images, save that image to text, and launch it. And if you're an admin, you can share files with them outside of it. So real innovative there. And basically, there's quite a bit of functionality that supports that I always say, I always like to give kind of a little roadmap of where we're going.

So we're excited to showcase our doc reader where we're going with that. We also have that OCR that I talked about in Tech State. Our goal has come December is to have the OCR functionality bill into text, excuse me, into doc reader inside of Canvas, which would allow a student or a faculty member to instantly take a, let's say, a saved image Maybe something that isn't quite accessible and be able to ocr it and and make it readable with a read speaker product. I talked a little bit about new quizzes and Respondus, which, you know, we're really excited about. And then finally, we know the United States is a melting pot.

We also know that there's a lot of languages that aren't being quote unquote supported we actually create voices. We just created was it seven African voices? I'm involved in a project for some Indigenous nations. To preserve their languages there. So we're we're working on not only language preservation, but provide those tools that some other products may not be out there. So we're willing to work with organizations on there.

I won't be I won't fib it is a little bit more pricier than our than our real budget prices of of offering our functionality to here, but it is something that you own and control. So for an example, Spotify Sonos they own those voices. We created for them, but they are owned and branded by them their own. I'll just think there's any I know we're Well, I I wanna I wanna mention this. I wanna mention this.

But, for you and the with the the testing question, stick around because I do wanna talk to you a little bit more. But we do offer a free sandbox environment. So what's really cool about that is there's no strings attached. We like for you to kick to tires. We want you to, to play around with it in your environment, with your content.

You're not going to, you know, you know, get the benefit of without kicking the tires. But also, if you have a team back at home, I I know this conference has been a lot to digest. Go back home, talk to your team, call us, set email us, do whatever, set up a free demo. We will we will, set up a Zoom call, demo this, answer your questions. And, again, take advantage of that free sandbox environment.

It's literally as easy as sending that information to us. And and again, you know, Paul clearance, we have two other team sales team members that that cover the entire region. But again, we are at the booth, this evening and tomorrow morning. If you want to sit down and just have a quick, one on one, that's what we're here for. But again, thanks everyone for your time.

Y'all were awesome, and you had some great questions. But again, we're gonna stick around just for a few more minutes. Because I know that there is another session right behind us. But, again, we will be at the booth later tonight. If you have any follow-up questions since this was a lot to digest, and I think we ran through everything.

Did the end really, really quick. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you.