EasyReader Case Study: Modern-Eyes use Dolphin Producer to create accessible training materials.

Learning opportunities for all.

Modern-Eyes Training Services offer computing courses in the UK for individuals with visual impairments and provide instruction for organisations involved in the provision of accessible format materials for their customers, students and colleagues. All their training materials and work books are designed for use with Dolphin software products and many of the manuals are now being produced as Digital Talking Books with the help of Dolphin Producer. We asked them to tell us about their experiences:

“We have been using Dolphin’s Producer software for nearly two months now. We have found it a very versatile piece of software. It is extremely easy to use and produces good quality Digital Talking Books with several levels of navigation. At present, we are working with two groups of students at the Coney Hill Neighbourhood College in Gloucester. We have had to write new resource books for them to use as currently only standard, printed versions are available. Putting the books into audio was not an option as the commands are all designed for mouse users. As all of our students are registered partially sighted or blind, they are all keyboard users and cannot use print easily.

As we have been working with our students, we have begun to compile a comprehensive catalogue of specially adapted workbooks. Until we discovered Dolphin’s Producer software, we were finding it difficult to obtain funding to convert these workbooks to audio tape. Now we have Dolphin’s Producer, we are able to convert all our resources to digital talking books (DTBs) ourselves, quickly and easily. Most of our students have either a DAISY player, an MP3 player or CD Walkman. They are able to use these to access their DTB work books. The EaseReader software player has also been extremely useful when playing back and checking our DTBs. For those students who do not have DAISY or MP3 devices, we have found that it is relatively easy to convert the DTBs to standard audio so they can be played on a standard CD Walkman. This doesn’t give the more sophisticated levels of navigation provided in the DTBs, however it is far easier for the students to use than audio tapes. We have found that we can make navigation easier for these students by setting regular headings within our documents and then saving the sections between headings as separate tracks. It does mean a bit more work for us, but it is still a quick and easy way to provide such a choice of accessible formats. All our workbooks are created for our students to work in conjunction with Dolphin’s Supernova software. Some of our students are using a combination of speech and magnification, some just speech and some just magnification.

We find Supernova an ideal piece of software for us to use under these circumstances. All our students are now really confident using the access software. Using Dolphin Producer is so simple, the program is easy to install following the on-screen instructions. EaseReader software is also be installed for playing back the books. Once fully installed, Producer becomes available in Microsoft Word as an extra item on the Menu Bar at the top. We have both sighted and blind tutors and both can use Producer equally easily. The drop-down menu has all the required commands and is easily accessed by a keyboard shortcut. All the dialogue boxes are really easy to navigate with a screen reader and are fully accessible. There is also a choice of several different reading voices and speeds.

We have found that ‘Scansoft Daniel, Full 22KHz’ is the most popular with our students! Once a DTB has been created, it is possible to play it back using the included Dolphin EaseReader software. This software is really useful for those who are partially sighted as there is the option to read the text at the same time as listening to the audio. The font sizes and colours, as well as the highlighting options can all be altered to suit the individual’s needs. It is fully synchronized to make this easier. As well as partially sighted students, this software is extremely useful for those with dyslexia and other similar difficulties. A very versatile tool indeed!”

Thanks to Dolphin software, the following courses are now available in various accessible formats:

• An introduction to mouse-free computing:
  • Before you start
  • Screen Reader
  • Magnification
  • Working with menus
  • Working with disks
  • Basic word processing
  • Basic Email
  • File management
  • Short cuts
  • Practice exercises
  • Web browsing and HTML
• OCN
  • Word processing – Level 1
• ECDL
  • Spreadsheets – Microsoft EXCEL
  • Other ECDL workbooks are in progress, as well as an intermediate Mouse Free Computing and OCN Word processing Level 2.

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