Text to Speech for Education

Accessibility in education focuses on providing equitable and inclusive education learning for all. It is about presenting material in a way that any learner can access it, removing any barriers that may limit the user’s ability to consume content.

Accessibility isn’t just concerned with physical impairments, but also addresses the large population of those with learning disabilities. Whether it be using education technology or designing courses using universal design for learning (UDL) concepts, accessibility is about being inclusive and providing the best education for all students.

Often used in special education and for students and childrens with learning disabilities, accessibility technology services level the playing field for ALL students by using technology to eliminate the mechanics of acquiring knowledge so that the content and the meaning of the content can be focused on and assimilated.

Accessibility technology has many benefits such as giving struggling students autonomy, improving learning results, encouraging reluctant readers, improving self esteem and motivation, levelling the playing field as well as supporting teachers as they educate a diverse population of learners.

Making content accessible for students entails firstly designing courses properly to ensure they are accessible from the outset. This may include tagging, using alt texts, providing simple text formats or closed captioning videos.

Secondly it’s about providing education technology tools that enable those with physical impairments, or learning disabilities to access the content, such as text to speech, screen readers and speech synthesis tools.

Not to be confused with speech to text, speech synthesis for education, or text to speech (TTS), converts text into spoken voice output. Speech synthesis is a key component of assistive technologies that offer a computer-generated spoken voice to ‘read’ text to the student.

Speech synthesis is surprisingly easy to provide to students. There are free assistive technology tools on most devices. However, for it to really help students,it is important to find a high quality paid for service.

Not only as technology in the classroom, these services can be used by individuals or by entire organisations by integrating speech synthesis in the Learning Management System.