Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

I’m very impressed with the free software I’m featuring today, and I find it hard to believe that I had never heard of it until this week. Many thanks to Kerry Randle for the tip! As I see it, WordTalk is a quintessential UDL tool. Microsoft Word has become ubiquitous in schools around the world, and WordTalk has the potential to improve access to reading and writing for many students. This is a productivity tool with applications across the curriculum.

WordTalk (downloadable program) This free plug-in enables text in any Microsoft Word document to be read aloud. As a useful bonus, WordTalk also comes with a talking spell checker and thesaurus. The simplicity of WordTalk’s toolbar makes it highly accessible, and the toolbar’s functions are easy to configure for individual preferences. To further enhance accessibility, the software comes pre-programmed with keyboard commands.

WordTalk reads by word, sentence, or by paragraph. Or, it will read continuously from wherever you place the cursor in a document. When you ask WordTalk to read, the selected reading unit is highlighted, and then each word within that unit is highlighted in another colour as it is read. By default, WordTalk uses SAPI 5 voices, and these can be downloaded with the program if they are not already on your computer. Other commercially available voices, however, seem to work flawlessly.

The first screenshot below shows WordTalk’s toolbar in the context of the MSWord interface. The second shot shows the functions of the toolbar buttons. The third screenshot shows the interface of the talking spell checker. (Click to enlarge the thumbnail, and use your browser’s back arrow to return to this page.)

WordTalk has been developed by Rod Macaulay of TASSC in Aberdeen, Scotland. The program is promoted by the CALL Centre. The documentation for installing the plug-in is clear and well illustrated. Installation instructions are provided for both standalone and networked computers. Also available from the WordTalk site is a helpful presentation entitled, “WordTalk: Enabling Access to Curriculum Resources for Students with Additional Support Needs”. This presentation is available for download in html, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

WordTalk installs in any version of Word from Word 97 on. Installation is not difficult, but it is important to follow the instructions carefully. WordTalk runs only in Windows.