The Audio Revision Project at Lochaber High School is a really good example of how learning resources can be provided in alternative formats. The project is a collaboration between Dyslexia Lochaber, who raised the funding and organised some volunteer narrators, and Lochaber High School. Revision materials (some produced by staff, some commercial publications) were recorded and made available as podcasts on the school web site and the end result of the project is a set of revision materials for Standard Grade and Higher courses for all the subjects offered by the school in audio format. Pupils can listen to the revision materials online or download them to their own computers or audio players. Have a look at the project site and listen to what's been recorded.

Spoken Ink is a new web site offering downloadable audio short stories by authors such as Roald Dahl, Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood "and a host of new and unknown talent." Most of the stories cost 99p to download and you can listen to them on your computer, MP3 player, mobile phone etc.

This is a chance for you to help improve the accessibility of Glow. If Glow is to fulfil it's aims it needs to be accessible to every pupil in Scotland and one way of helping many pupils with visual or reading difficulties is through 'text-to-speech' software, so that pupils can have material on Glow read out to them by the computer. There are many text-to-speech programs for reading different types of digital text, such as:

• Rod Macaulay's WordTalk (which you can download free from CALL), can read out Word documents, for example, or
• TextHelp's PDFaloud, which can read PDFs such as digital textbooks or SQA exam papers,

but we also need a program for reading text from the web itself.

Again there are several options (see Allan's Reading the Web guide at  http://www.callscotland.org.uk/Resources/Publications/Information-Sheets/) , and one of them is Browsealoud from TextHelp Systems. Browsealoud is a free program that reads 'speech-enabled' web sites and also Word and PDF files on the web sites.TextHelp have agreed to 'speech-enable' the CALL Scotland and LTS web sites and also Glow until the end of January 2010, for us to evaluate. CALL’s speech-enabled web sites are:

• http://www.callscotland.org.uk
• http://www.adapteddigitalexams.org.uk/
• http://www.books4all.org.uk/
• http://www.communicationpassports.org.uk/
• http://www.thescottishvoice.org.uk/
• http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/

All LTS web sites (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/) and also everything accessed through the Glow portal are speech-enabled.The pilot Books for All Scotland Database at http://www.booksforallscotland.org.uk/ is also speech-enabled.To read the web sites with Browsealoud you need to download it from http://www.browsealoud.com/page.asp?pg_id=80004.Jennifer MacDougal from LTS has agreed to set up a discussion forum for the Glow users and so once you have tried out Browsealoud on Glow, go to My Glow Groups > ASN Group and add your comments about it to the discussion. The direct URL for this is https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/nationalsite/Additional%20Support%20for%20Learning/Lists/Pages/Discussions.aspxBrowsealoud is essentially a tool for reading web sites with text-to-speech software. It can help pupils with visual impairment, dyslexia, reading and learning difficulties or pupils who are not fluent English readers access information on web sites. It can speak using a number of different voices including Heather, the Scottish voice. To take part in this trial, download and run Browsealoud and then test it on Glow or on the CALL or LTS websites, and then log any comments or issues on the Glow group. If you can’t access Glow send an email to CALL at callscotland@ed.ac.uk. LTS are currently looking at how the accessibility of Glow can be improved, and a text-to-speech facility could be extremely useful, if not essential, for thousands of pupils in Scotland (not much point in having a national intranet if it isn’t accessible to all pupils in Scotland). Browsealoud is only one option for reading the web and so you might also like to look at some others such as Click Speak, a free add-on for Firefox, but it  is really important that we all have a chance to test this particular tool to find out if it does what we all want. Please comment on whether you think Browsealoud would help pupils access Glow, as well as any problems that you come across. Take a look at the video tours and user guides on the Browsealoud web site as well – see http://www.browsealoud.com/page.asp?pg_id=80006We’re aware that you won’t have much time before the end of term, but no doubt some keen people will be unable to resist the temptation to play with Browsealoud over the break, and there will be a few weeks at the start of next term for you to try it.Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year

The latest edition of the Accessibility Action Group newsletter is well worth a read and shows how much is going on in the field of accessible formats. For example:

• new guidelines for publishers in how they should respond to requests for permission to adapt books or for digital versions of books;
• an update on the DCSF Accessible Textbook project in England;
• an update on the Right to Read Alliance eBook working group's  efforts to encourage accessible eBooks;
• news that Adobe plans to improve the accessibility of it's less-than-accessible Adobe Digital Editions software;
• the Publisher Lookup Awards for publishers who have been particularly helpful to print-disabled readers;
• new Pearson HTMLbooks - digital versions of (North American) textbooks for the same price as print copies - this is what we want from all publishers

Lots of teachers, pupils and parents are interested in scanning books into the computer, converting it readable text, so that for example:

• pupils with physical disabilities can press a key on the keyboard, or click a switch, to turn the pages, or
• dyslexic pupils can have the text read out with text-to-speech software, or
• pupils with sight loss can use text-to-speech software or magnify the text to read the book.

There’s a good article by Jim Kauppila on making digital files from printed materials in the latest issue of Closing the Gap. Jim's project has scanned hundreds of books and thousands of pages and in the process has gathered a lot of experience. You can read the article by signing up for a 14 day trial of Closing the Gap. Jim advocates a similar process to the one that we covered in the recent Books for All courses at Stirling, which involves:

1. Scanning the book
2. Converting the scanned image to text using FineReader Pro optical character recognition (OCR)
3. Checking and editing the text with FineReader Pro.
4. Saving from FineReader as PDF (which makes a digital book that looks like the original) and Plain Text or RTF (for further editing in Word, say, if you want for example a Large Print copy)
5. Saving from RTF/Plain text/Word as MP3 audio.
6. Adding structure to the PDF with Acrobat Pro.

The nice thing about this workflow model is that it generates several different types of accessible format for lots of pupils with different literacy support needs.