Luis Pérez, Ph. D.

Author: Luis Pérez, Ph. D.

Luis Pérez is a technical assistance specialist at CAST, but the views shared on this website are all his own. He holds a doctorate in special education and a master’s degree in instructional technology from the University of South Florida. Luis was recognized with an International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Making It Happen! Award in 2020. Other recognitions include Apple Distinguished Educator (2009) and Google Certified Innovator (2014). Luis has published three books on accessibility, mobile learning and UDL: Mobile Learning for All (Corwin Press), Dive into UDL (ISTE) and Learning on the Go (CAST Publishing). He currently serves as an Education and Learning strand advisor for the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA).

Free

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/91405/

Text to Voice is a Firefox plug-in that adds text to speech to any web page. After you install the add-on, you will see a small speaker icon in the lower right corner of the Firefox window. To use the extension, select some text on a web page and click once on the speaker icon. You will then hear the selected text.

This extension currently supports two voices (Male and Female). Of the two, I found the female voice to be the best in terms of clarity and pacing. The preferences can be accessed by right-clicking on the speaker icon.

You can also use the extension by selecting some text on the page, right-clicking on the selection, and choosing Speak It!. This should bring up a small window (your popup blocker might need to be disabled). One of the options on the popup window will be a link you can click on to download an MP3 version of the selected text.

I am working on a screencast of how to create ePub documents for the iPad using Pages ’09.

Three things to keep in mind when creating ePub documents with Pages:

the ePub export feature is only available for word processing documents.
Your images should be added inline. A good way to ensure all images (as well as video/audio files are inline is to always use the Insert menu, instead of dragging in a file from the Media Browser or the Desktop).
Use the styles menu to add styles to headings. You can then use the TOC tab of the Document Inspector to check which items you want to be listed in the table of contents automatically created by Pages 09. The top item on the TOC will be used to divide your document into chapters.

The final thing I want to emphasize is that this format is really intended for text. When VoiceOver is used to read the ePub document in iBooks, it will only read alternative text for those who are blind if the text is added as a caption underneath each image (such as Figure 1a. ….). This is essential for accessibility.

Update: You can get around the fact that Pages does not let you insert alt text for images by renaming your image file to match the desired alt text before you add it to the Pages document.