jansson@uwovax.uwo.ca (04/02/91)
Somebody asked me for assistance with helping a a blind student. Since I do not know much about this field I hope that you can help me. What this administrator is interested in is a system set up for this student to be able to write exams at schools. This would primarily involve answering short essay type questions. The procedure is that the exam questionnaire gets "translated"? to braille for the student and then the student would obviously answer the question asked. This student would like to use a computer to answer the questions and is apparently familiar with using a computer at home. I perused the files I found at SIMTEL20 in directories PD1:<MSDOS.HANDICAP> PD1:<MSDOS.VOICE> and there are apparently programs available which will produce a speaking interface for some commercial sofware. Most of these refer to a "speech synthesizer". The only way to get sound from an IBM machine that I have heard about is SoundBlaster and similar boards. Is this a "speech syntesizer"? If it is this particular board does not appear to be supported by the software available from SIMTEL. I do not think that a speaking interface for WordPerfect is what this administrator is looking for but rather a simple editor (somthing like TED maybe) but what is a necessity is the ability to move within a document and allowing the student to hear what was previously typed. As you note I do not know much about this, thus your assistance would be greatly appreciated. The system must run on an IBM machine and my questions are: 1. How much money need to be spent? 2. What systems are available? Thanks for your assistance, Mikael Jansson@uwo.ca