Okay everybody it's about a minute after by my handy-dandy iPhone so we are going to go ahead and get started. Welcome to the first session of the read and write webinar series. We are using the zoom product this time and Sean will give you a little bit of an explanation about that in a moment but my name is Robert Beach and I'm the assistive technology specialist at Kansas city Kansas community college and my colleagues here,

 My name is Sean Payton work at Cleveland University Kansas City and I'm the alternate media specialist there.

 Okay, and EASI norm comes and easy access to  software and information is sponsoring the information we are doing this for them and we thank them. We are using a new platform so it's a little bit different. Hopefully it will work well for us but we really wanted to be able to do the screen share so that you could see what we are doing as we are doing it instead of trying to do slideshows and explain it that way. So hopefully this works well for us. We will see. Sean's going to give you a rundown on the zoom interface now. How to use that so I will turn it over to him.

 During the webinar we are going to have the microphones muted. Just to eliminate some extra background. But there's a chat window available and you can access the chat window by either clicking it, or you can do alt plus Z... you can send messages to us or others and if for some reason you cannot access the chat you can raise your hand and we will unmute to you so you can ask the question. To use the keyboard just to AltY. If your screen reader user you should have received a document from Norm with the key commands. Captioning is available, you will see that on the icon at the bottom and you can click to activate and if you are on android or iOS device you want to go to the settings and activate it. Keyboard users must be in the interface for the commands to work. If you aren't, use control shift to focus on the interface [inaudible].

 Okay anything else that we need to throw in there

 I don't think so, again, Sean is going to watch the chat window so if you have questions on that be sure to type in the chat window or if you can't get there and you have problems type in alt Y and raise your hand and we will get to US and as we can.

 Read and write is a tool Designed for literacy. It has many tools within the tool. It is a whole suite of tools used for notebook reading writing research and study process. This tool has proven to be very very effective on our campus. I want to quickly give you three little success stories we had here. To join our college you have to take a placement test. And if you score 40 or below... sorry you had to score 40 or above to be able to take academic classes. If you score below that you have to go to what we call adult education to work on those basic adult skills.

We had a student last fall who took the placement test the first time she just took it without any accommodations and she scored a 26. So she got the paperwork and we let her do the CD version of the test where I just read the question and she had to market down and scored went down to a 25. Then I set her up with read and write on the academic placer test and her score went up to 63. So, that tells me that this tool can be very effective for students.

We had a student who was in our adult education program, struggling struggling struggling. Very frustrated. We finally got him testing, found out he had a learning disability. I've never known anybody so happy to find out he had a disability.  he said at least it let him know he was not crazy. He was diagnosed. He was still struggling... The skills we worked with on him, we should have read and write. He went from almost failing, struggling to fail if you will, to graduating with honors from the Adult Ed program, and came from the academic side and took classes here, graduated with an associate's degree and went on, and he also was invited back to speak to our adult Ed program graduation a couple years later. Very successful.

Another student came from another college. They brought him over, he was struggling, he was getting hours upon hours, trying to write a three page essay for his class. He had to do to [within a week] spending 10 to 15 hours per essay. And then his wife had to sit down with him and try to interpret what he had written and spend more hours so he was putting way way too much time trying to write these essays that was interfering with other homework. I set him up with read and write gold. He was able to write his own essay. Within a much much shorter period of time. His essay, he and his wife would spend minimal time reviewing it and he was able to turn it in and get A and B quality work on his essays. The program is very effective. If you don't use a program such as read and write, there are others but read and write is what we are using here and we are focused on here. These programs can be so beneficial to your students. I strongly recommend that you invest in them.

 You can get several different licensing options.We here at our campus have an unlimited site license for all three of our campuses as well as the take-home license. So we can give a copy of read and write for students or employees to put on their computers and use at home. And it's been very well received here.

 Okay some kind of giving you a background of what read and write is as far asHow beneficial it is and everything. It's a wonderful tool. What we are going to do now, we are going to move into actually showing you how read and write works and to do that we are going to share our screen with you so you should see my desktop come up on your screen and Sean is going to show you how to work with read and write?

. Gold as far as setting up the toolbar. So Sean we have a quick question from Beth, asking how can I turn off captioning sounds in jaws?

 Turn off captioning sounds in jaws. That's a good question. Just turn off the captioning window and see if that does it.

 Didn't work [laughter]

 Oh no, that's a good question. I don't have jaws loaded on either of my machines right now so I don't know what's going on, what sounds you are hearing.

 Turned off jaws

 That is a quick fix. I will look into that that's a good question. Thank you, Beth. Okay Sean/

 Okay should now have the screen share so you should see

 I'm sorry, we didn't turn on the recording.

 Oh I did.

 Oh thank you

 A little bit late but I got that message that said we should record it. We should be good now. Let me get some of this other stuff out of the way that I can see so, read and write is a little purple puzzle piece icon that we just try moving, I can see it down here. And we have... this little machine be a little bit slow with us today. So bear with us if for some reason it doesn't feel like keeping up. We have another option there... because it is not letting me grab read and write at all right now. [Inaudible]

 Are you actually on the desktop

 I am on the desktop. Screen share on the desktop.

 In other words did you move focus to the actual desktop/

 Yes. it just does not want me to load it as quickly. So this is what it's going to look like when it starts loading. This little loading screen here and in a few moments what we are going to see is a toolbar. It is a floating toolbar when it just loads up so will be able to move it around and I will show you some different things we can do with that once the toolbar gets loaded. And I apologize for the speed at which it is loading.

 Technology always tends to give you the issues when you are doing the presentation because we work with zoom for the last two weeks and it's always been very responsive and now all of a sudden there are problems today.there we go so here is the read and write toolbar... Driver stopped for some reason. Here is the floating toolbar that we can move around. We can move it anywhere we want on the screen but we can also talk it. We can dock it just by dragging it or you can  dock it on the left side. You can dock it on the right side. Or you can dock it up at the top. [Inaudible]

 Somebody is not muted. We have some background noise from that you might check and see...

[Inaudible]

 Okay I think we are good now.

 Sorry about that

 Right now we have a docked up at the top. Anytime you want to undock it there is a little anchor. When it's up to the top it will be on the right, when it's on the sides it will be at the bottom. You just click the little anchor to undock it, and now it turns into the floating toolbar but for now let's docket at the top and we will go from there. Each one of these icons is a different tool. So you can see quite a few different tools here. But there are quite a few more tools than that. The double right arrow option will give us additional tools. So let me check something really quick. What I'm doing is making sure that these... you are able to see all of the tools available. Again, it wants to move a little bit slower than we'd like.

That bar that I am pulling up right now, the drop-down is the main drop-down menu for read and write but I want to make sure we are loaded onto the all features toolbar because the all teachers toolbar gives you access to all the features and that's a good way for me to show you how many tools there are in this program. Once this drop-down happens I will be able to quickly get over to that and show you how many items will show up with that little double right arrow button. Another way you can get through the different toolbars is by clicking... the read and write [inaudible] icon so each time you click that it will rotate to a different toolbar because there are multiple toolbars available including reading features, writing features, research features, study skill features and the my features toolbar, which is probably my favorite and I will show you why in a bit once the system decides to start moving a little bit quicker.

Okay. There's the study skills toolbar. Looks like it wants to let me do it this way. I'm just going to cycle through and see if I can get this thing going.

 Okay so here's the all features toolbar.We will click on that and you will see a lot more options pop up. While we wait for this thing to catch up with us, there's one thing I want to show you, that I would generally talk about later but since the system doesn't want to behave right now we will go ahead and talk about it now. Is anytime you have questions about any of these tools... there is a video list of all the tool options available. If it decides it wants to show up, actually over here. So I'm going to try something else real quick. And see if, this does not like being docked. There it is not letting us on to the main menu.

 Okay why don't we

 Going to close it and reopen it.

 Let's try that first.

 I apologize again for the technical issues happening.

 I think I know what part of the problem is. They said the display driver stopped working and that's typically an issue that Jaws can cause with its display driver. We unloaded the jaws so that may be trying to [frustrate] as a little bit with our display driver.

 [Inaudible] as of right now... startup aborting is what it is saying. I'm going to try this again. Okay. [Inaudible] going to try something real quick and see if we can get the host switch over to Robert’s laptop which also has read and write loaded on it and that may work a little bit better. So bear with me for a moment. Okay. Yes. Alright you guys still hear me? All right. Now you see a much closer version of me which is not exactly what I had planned and unfortunately I have to stay close to this thing. Alright let's see here. Now we are going to... I'm going to share my desktop over here and everything looks much bigger and now you can also see me in the background. [Laughter] so you get two views of me. Exciting. See if we can show you a few things that hopefully the laptop will allow us to see. Okay let's go ahead and get the stock back up at the top like we needed to. And are you guys seeing my desktop right now? Hopefully. Trying to get onto the chat while I am here. All right. Good deal. Okay you guys, so now we can actually access this drop-down menu over on the right side so you can have the current toolbar that will show what is currently on. We have all features reading features, writing features, research features and study skills features. And so whichever one you are going to use this is another way to get there instead of clicking the purple puzzle piece icon. We are going to get [inaudible]

[Dog barking]

 There we go. Okay so why I'm on the toolbar [inaudible] going to show you something in here that we can do to manipulate what features and tools we have available. So in this current toolbar this helps me select what I want inside the toolbar and it's a lot more customizable. You can customize any of them but this is when I would suggest customizing as if you ever think you might want to do just reading tools, the reading features or the writing or reading features you want to leave those alone for the most part. Just so those features don't get lost in those toolbars. But in my features toolbar you can leave it open as you see fit and currently you see it [inaudible] a lot of different things in here. And  I will scroll through these really quick just to give you an idea. Of how many things there are. So pretty exciting stuff.

 The other thing you can do, you can hide the toolbar when docked. So let's go ahead and do that. And now it will automatically hide when it is docked put back up, go to the top of the screen and the cursor window will open back up. Another thing we can do is we can make it translucent when it is undocked and unused. I will go ahead and show you what that looks like undocked it, and it is hanging out, and [inaudible] in a moment it becomes translucent. You can still see it but for the most part by definition it is translucent. Other things in the general options I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that we have different ways you can view each icon you can have small icons with text or without text, small icons with text, large icons without text and large icons with text. Generally I would suggest people start with the icons and text just until they get used to seeing the icons and knowing how to work with them. I personally, even though I use this program I use small icons with text so I don't have to rely on my memory too much. You can also adjust the sales. Currently we have clear cells. There's a clear style under color. Professional [inaudible] so they are all relatively similar in the way they look, but let's go ahead and put it on professional. A couple other things I will show you here from the drop-down menu you can also change the toolbar color so if you have certain colors that you like you can adjust the color of the toolbar however you see fit. So lots of different color options you can play around with and the last thing I'm going to be talking about is [inaudible].

 So if you wanted to know how any of these features or tools work a really good way to do that is the all video tours. Or call Robert. You can also call Robert anytime. So the video tours are great. They are to the point, they are [inaudible] probably most of them if not all of them and they all do a really good job of explaining the specific functions of those tools. And that's pretty much it for the toolbar we kind of had to bounce back [inaudible] that's all we had for that I'm in a go ahead and give this over to Robert and he will take you through the next section.

 One thing I'm not sure... in the display window there for setting up the toolbar if you uncheck any of those items in that list that means they will not show up on your toolbar that you are currently set to so if you set to my features and so you don't use word prediction or you don't use scanning because you don't have a scanner [inaudible] if you don't check those things they won't show up on the toolbar and it  leaves more information on the toolbar because it is less crowded so that's one of the things he was showing you I think with the switching back and forth it got a little confusing there so I just want to make sure that is clear. That is the toolbar and how you can set it up. And again this is a very very customizable program. Fortunately, so people can make this work pretty much however they want it to which is one of the great things I think about read and write.

We've had all of the three major programs of this type on our campus and I  taught my students how to use all three of the programs at that time and without exception they all came back to read and write. The two reasons they gave is number one they didn't feel like read and write was as intrusive. It was not as obvious they were using something different from all the other students in the classroom. Number two, it uses whatever technology you are working with so for example you write your documents in Microsoft Word just like the rest of your class. You write individual webmail or web browsing in your web browser just like everybody else whereas the other tools work within the interface and instructors were uncomfortable, how do I center this or bold this, or how do I do something and this and they don't know the program so they are afraid to say oh you do this because that is what you do in word that might not have worked. So they just felt much more comfortable having this tool that floats over whatever technology they are working with. They are not having to work within a dedicated interface. So that is the toolbar. Really really cool. Way of accessing this. And by the way I forgot to mention earlier this program is available on the Windows machine which is what we are doing here but it's also available on Mac. You can get tools in the IOS and android environment and there is a chrome extension that you can use so it works very well in pretty much any environment that you are working in. And we are using  read and write 11 for this and there's a reason for that. Read and write 12 is out we were going to do that for next fall and we found a read and write was released just before we were going to do the presentation I talked to the tech folks at the conference in November in Colorado, accessing higher ground which by the way is a wonderful conference if you have not been there really ought to try going and they recommend to stick with 11.5 for now because 12 was kind of a prerelease. It's not got all the tools. They haven't completely redone the tools. They were trying to get out a version that was a cutdown version for very basic tools that some of the 12 system would use and so they release that. It's not the full tools. They will be reducing later versions of read and write 12 which will include all the tools, bringing back for example speech recognition that is not in 12 at the time we were talking with them but it was coming back. So that is just one of the examples. So read and write 11.5 at this time is still the fullest featured version of read and write but that should change by fall of this year. The next thing we want to do is set up speech because everyone has a different version of how they want speech to work for them. To do that we're going to bring down the speech menu I'm going to do the talking but Sean will do the driving. If you see both of us looking like we are doing something it is really just him but we're going to drop down the speech menu which is a little arrow beside the play button. And that's going to bring down our main menu we will bring down the one that says speech options. Speech options gives us a four pane window just like the general options did a little bit ago. And the speech options we are going to look at the left pane first. This is the speech pane. And in here you have several things you can do. First of all we want to test our voice and see what it currently sounds like so we're going to click on the test the voice button and I think you have the sound muted

[Inaudible]

 And hearing the laptop... 67% volume... 70% volume there

 Try the max to test voice

 100% [inaudible] test voice

 So let's see if maybe we need to select a voice. Let's click on the search button and this is going to let us search for voices on the computer. We should of had a Microsoft David and Microsoft [inaudible] here and this is the new install read and write 11 on the laptop by the way so we have not even had a chance to install a little bit before the meeting started so we are going to check both David Microsoft and Microsoft Zira

[Inaudible]

... and US Tom

 Will do Mark, Eva and Tom and put them over there. And then we're going to click the okay button and they should appear in our list of the voices now. So we are going to click on Microsoft David to start with and then we're going to click on the test scores button and see what happens.

 Nothing.

 Huh. Okay. Make sure we don't have our sound muted in the same window. I don't think we do or they would not be hearing us.

 I think we did

 Okay we want spend a lot of time trying to get it to talk but in other words you can adjust the voice here so you have the speed slider, you can slow or fast if it is not reading at the speed you want you also have a pitch slider so you can adjust it if it is not a pitch that is comfortable and a lot of people do have issues with certain frequencies so the pitch slider can be very important. If somebody's not comfortable with the voice and they are not understanding it well I suggest try and adjusting the pitch slider one way or another and see if it makes it clear because it is amazing if you get right in the frequency that is just right for them how all of a sudden proof that happens if they have an auditory processing issue really play around with the speech or pitch slider.  sorry.

 That's pretty straightforward so I'm not going to spend any time for whatever reason the laptop Mike is not working so were going to go to the right hand window and by next week folks I guarantee I'm going to dig into both of these computers and see what is going on with them. Why they decided to misbehave today.

We are going to go over to the right-hand tab which is the highlight tab. This is where you can select how read and write is going to highlight words as it reads them to you. So the first thing you want to do is decided you want it to highlight in the document, so in other words if you are in the word document if you have it read in the word document it's going to simply highlight the words right there in the word document or you can have it highlight in the text reader window which means when you picked the play button it is going to pop up another window with that text within it and highlight the window. The advantage to that is that the extra window, the text reader window allows you more control over adjusting things such as font size, font types, other coloring that can happen besides just the highlight colors. And so it gives you a few more options within the text window. You can have it highlight one window at a time, so a window is going to pop up and show you one word at a time and highlight it or you can have no highlighting whatsoever. So when it is reading to you you can hear it but it's not going to track on the screen. Generally my students use the highlight and document, but there could be occasions when you want one of the other options.

 Then of course you have all of the different highlight colors that you can choose from. Color combinations. And you can kind of see those there. I think my default is a blue yellow combination. A lot of my students use that, but some switch to other color combinations. There's some research out there that says certain types of dyslexia work better with certain colors. There's no hard and fast rule on that. But just be aware if you are working with somebody with dyslexia that color highlighting may be very important to them.

 Okay we are going to look at the other reader tab which is  the third tab over so the next in the highlight tab and in this tab you can do, there are two pieces. First of all, the section deals with how it is going to read as you are typing. You can turn on speak as I type and if you do that you have three options. You can have it speak every character as you type it, you can have it speak each word when you are done typing the word in each space it's going to say the word or you can have it speak a sentence. If you get to the end of the sentence and you have the punctuation it will read the entire sentence back to you. You can turn on all three of those any two of those any one of those or none of those depending on what you're reading preferences are. How much feedback you want. I have a lot of students who use the word in a sentence and I have a lot of students use word and I have a lot of students use a sentence I don't the guys had any students use the character, speak by character but somebody may want that kind of feedback. Then you also have what they call the screen reading option. And if you turn that on you can tell it what kind of elements you want it to speak when you mouse over them. So you can out the shortcuts on the desktop if you mouse over them or announce tools on your toolbar if you mouse over them. The caveat is those tools have to be created with tooltips or text so that read and write has something to read. If it is just a tool, just a button with no text to it then read and write can identify. The same situation as somebody using JAWS or NVDA, the button doesn't have the text to it than it does not have anything to read.

 Then the last window we are going to talk about Is the say like window which is the second window over in this window if read and write is not pronouncing a word correctly for you you can go in here and have it say the word correctly. And unfortunately since we don't have Sam this is not going to be as effective, but we use the name Kashi, and read and write pronounces it Kaisha. And so here we put the word Kasha into the box where you put the word you want to say and then in the say like box we type it out phonetically so that it will pronounce the name Kashi. Unless we have it saying the word we want it to be said we can save it to the dictionary and from then on read and write comes across the name Kasha it will say it and not Kaisha. We are going to show you just a couple three more things in the speech menu but we will cover these more when we get into our next sessions, but if we drop down the speech menu again you see we had some options for read by, so in other words as it is reading you can have a block which is a sentence or a paragraph or a word.

 Can I try something really quick [inaudible] see if it lets us or not...

 Oh well. We will do better for next week. Like I said presentation day is always the day that technology goes south on you. Okay so again you will see how those different block sizes can be important when we do the reading section. You can also turn on and off [inaudible] you can quickly turn it on and off here and then of course you have other read next block, read the web so if you are on the web it will work slightly different... these are some other tools you can work with and set up read and write when you have it read back to you.

Okay that's pretty much what we wanted to cover this time. I'm glad we left a little extra time in. That we do have time for questions and answers. But our roadmap is next week we are going to cover the reading tools. The week after that we are going to look at the writing tools and the last week, week four we are going to cover the research and study skills tools. In the last webinar. So that is kind of our roadmap of where we are going to be going and we will be looking at those tools.

 So we are going to open it up for questions. Will be looking in the chat window if there are questions we will take those now and see what we can do.

 I have multiple different windows I can work with [inaudible] be very friendly... So close to this

[Laughter]

 Going to type in if there are any questions to see if anybody has any. [Inaudible]

 We will say that remember EASI has other webinars coming up so you want to keep a close watch on EASI website for other webinars they offer and the website is EASI.cc. And you can go to the link when it comes on the page and see what other webinars are upcoming summer free and some are not free but Norm always tries to come up with some good information for you.

 I'm going to go ahead and put in my [inaudible] Cleveland University if you guys have questions feel free to shoot me an email as well. Probably most of you if not all of you have Roberts.

[Inaudible]

... going to put in my phone number as well. Some people like me I'm a phone person. I like to talk to people.

[Inaudible]

 [Inaudible]

 All right we had a question from Carrie is there a difference between the Google extension versus the read and write 11.5. We edit books and are struggling with editing using the extensions.

 The Google extension is part of read and write 11. It is basically designed so that if you're using a chrome browser, the chrome book environment is supposed to make things work better there. I unfortunately do not have a lot of experience with that. I've had students use chrome and the chrome extension but I have not been with them when they were trying to edit in Google docs or anything of that nature. If you can tell me specifically what is going on I can try and research it for you to find out if I have a solution for you.

 Nothing else coming through.

 Okay Sean... use chrome don't you as your browser most of the time? have you played with read and write in the chrome environment/

 I have not. Okay let me check something really quick.

 I will go ahead and unmute Norm and Beth's microphone and see if they have anything to say.

 Beth you are good to go if you'd like to add anything and Norm you are good also. You should be. You are not yet, but working on you.

[Laughter]

 Okay I think we've got norm.

 I'm not seeing norm yet

 Oh my gosh.

 Hello, Beth.

 Can you hear me?

 Yeah we've got you...

 [Inaudible]

 I want to thank those who came today and thank Robert and Sean for the desktop experience of how things work. We will move on to the more detailed technical things starting next week. I will send an email next Monday morning and Robert will probably send out one next Tuesday morning [inaudible] I guess I don't mean that the way it sounds. And later this week I should send out the [inaudible]

 Yeah, we will record it

... all the announcements that I have for that. You want to say anything Beth?

 Only that there is another question in there.

 Yeah, Sean

[Several voices]

 Editing the books using Abby the schools are telling us that in their read and write it reads it as letters versus words.

 Okay. So you have run it through Abby and save at a Word document I'm guessing what you go ahead and unmute Karen if she has a microphone she can talk. Probably make it a little bit easier than waiting on chats. But I'm guessing that you have edited in Abby and saved it as a Word document? But, when they were using read and write

 In a PDF document in the chat... Karen you should be able to chat now I've got you unmute it if

 You have a microphone

 Or chat works as well.

 So you saved it as a PDF. I have a feeling that's probably where the issue is. Depending on your settings in Abby for saving as a PDF. So probably that is something we should chat about outside of this because I have a feeling it is more the PDF issue then the read and write issue.

 She's asking if she should save it as word instead

 Word will work better in most cases then PDF and there are settings to save is tagged PDF, PDF you a which stands for universal access, and if you don't have it checked then the PDF you check will be be flaky. And may still be flaky but if you don't have it checked in your [PDF options] than the PDF might be a little bit wild on you. So that we can check. If you'd like and I can help you do that if you'd like to give me a call or send me an email we can connect up and chat

[Ambient noise]

 But you might try saving it as a Word document, save a chapter you've had issues with, save it as a Word document and try again and see what happens. Okay anything else?

 Karen, did we find depending on the font of the book read and write won't read a certain fonts...

 Um is this a PDF you got from the publisher or one that you have processed and [saved out]?

 Publisher files

 I have not had issues with anything we have saved out. Some publishers will use unique fonts and what happens is, for example where as we see the letters F and I and RST... for the word first of the PDF is using the font as Fi so there is not FI there there is a font that looks like FI. So if that's what's happening in the book it's going to read really weird. But it should not be all that same font. Again, that's probably going to be because it is a graphic of fonts, not true text. It's an actual graphic and we put the text behind that graphic. Already. Anything else? We have about 10 minutes. I did not expect it to go this quick but part of that because the speech wasn't working so we couldn't demonstrate and let you hear how things changed as we changed to speech and set up the speech. But next week we will try to have all of that going much better. We are going to stick around and work on that as soon as this is over.

 Okay well we will hang around for a few more minutes if people have questions we will be watching the chat room. But otherwise we will see you next week. I will be creating the meeting for next week here shortly and when we do I will get the link sent to everybody so that you will have it. You can add it to your calendar or what have you and we should be good to go.

 I don't see any more questions come through.

 Okay. Well, Norm, Beth I will probably be emailing with you between now and them but otherwise I will see you guys next Tuesday. And we will see how things go.

 Thank you for all of your hard work [Echo] technology. Thank you Sean and thank you Robert.

 Thank you guys.