Welcome to the third session on the webinars on Read and Write. I am Robert Beach. Thank you to Mr. Norm Koons and EASI for sponsoring these webinars and letting us do these. We appreciate the opportunity to do that. The webinar will be recorded and Norm will be posting the recordings, and the caption transcripts, all those files, after the webinar. When I get them to him, he will be able to take care of that for us. So you will be able to go back and play these later. Microphones are muted. If you have questions, feel free to either raise your hand with the Alt-Y command, I believe it was or if you want to, you can type in the chat window and Shaun will be keeping an eye on that and we'll try and answer questions as we go. We certainly welcome questions. So feel free to ask questions. First week we talked about setting up Respect and Write and getting the toolbar and speech set up the way you want it. Last week we talked about reading tools. I realized there was one thing I was going to do a demonstration O and it totally slipped my mind. I think it has something to do with gray hair but I don't know what that is. Anyway, I'm going to do that first this week and this week we'll get into the writing tools and show some of the tool that is Read and Write have to support the writing process. We're going to go ahead and share our screen, Read and Writes already loaded. And also, just to let you know, if you're wondering why you don't see us on video, we have a bit of an eye storm in the area right now so we are in a remote location.
we've been broadcasting over from my office at the college. SO Shaun braved the weather, and we're broadcasting from my house and I'm too cheap to buy a web cam. So. First thing I want to show you, one of the things that we have found Read and Right Wright to be helpful for our students are reading tests. The instructor will send us a test F. it's not already in a word format, we will convert it for them. Put it on a flash drive, put them on a secure computer and only have the reading tools available to them, where you disable the other tools, and they can read a test. It's really simple. I can show awe student how to do this in like, five minutes, so I'm going to show you really quick, unless they have absolutely no experience with Are the and Write at all. We're going to load the one that says "Practice test."
All right. Now, to get Read and Write to work the way I think works best in a test, and most of my students will agree, I'm going to go bite speech menu, by the play button. Drop that down, and I'm going to set it to "Read by paragraph." I'm going to turn off "Automatically read next block." and of course, "read the web" is not on as well. So those settings are what I want to read a test. Simply, go down and I'm going to click in front of question number 1 and click my play button to read the question to me.
[Screen Reader]:
What is the name of the college you are attending?
So point here it again, I click the play button again.
[Screen Reader]: one. What is the name of the college you are attending.
And I can do that as many times as I want to. You don't have to relocate the mouse. Just click play button again and it'll read the current one, whatever that would be. Now, let's say I want to go on to the next block. I click my forward button and it'll read my first button on the multiple choice.
[Screen Reader]: University of.
B. state university.
C. Kansas city, community college.
all three have in them. so i may want to go back. what was the last one again. so can i click back.
[Screen Reader]:
C. Kansas city, community college.
B. Kansas state university. University of consist.
Forward.
. C. Kansas City, community college.
So the student can -- the student can register them as many times as they want. If they want to read this option again, all they have to do is click the play button again.
D. None of the above.
When they answer this question, they click in front of the next question and click the play button and they're ready to move on.
To the next one. So it makes it very easy on a multiple choice kind of test., I guess I should have loaded the other one. The other one, I put --
Do you want me to load it really quick?
yeah. Go load the sample one. And some of our student, the teachers want them to mark the answers on the actual test F. they have enough vision and dexterity to do so. Generally, the students outing tool for reading test are student that is have a print disability non-vision related. So they can mark their answers on a scantron or a test without any difficulty. But if they do have trouble, we let them mark it in the Word document and save it and we transfer the 24 their scrantron or test for them. Here's another example, it has the multiple choice question first. Then it has a short answer question. And a lot of our students, because they also want to use speak as I type. They want to hear, they want to be able to review their answer. We tell them, just click after. So go ahead and click after question number two and click your play button and we'll read the question.
[Screen Reader]: 2. Explain the difference between the degree program and the certificate program.
Then we tell them to click on the blank space after the question and write your answer. If you want to use the "Speak as a type" tools for doing short answers, we'll show them, they can turn on the "Speak ooze I type" my word or sentence and have it written back or they can simply click in front of their answer when they get done typing, click "Play" and read their answer back to them T. makes it really easy to do a test of this nature. Now, matching, it can be a little trickier, but they can click in front of what they're wanting to read and read it so they can have the words in the list read.) -- read to them and match it up that way.
That covers what I was going show last week on the reading side of things. Now we're going to move into the writing tools that we're going to demonstrate today. We're going to go to a blank word document. First thing I want to demonstrate is the speak as I type tool. So in this document, we're going to use this blank document. I'm going to make sure that I have my "Speak as I type" is turned on. That's in the Speech menu besides the Play Button. Okay. And if I remember correctly, I have this set to speak by word and sentence but I'm going to go double check that, since this is a computer we haven't used in a while. And refresh your memory of where we would go. So we're being to drop down the speech menu and go to Speech Options and go over to the Highlight taboo -- I'm sorry. Other read tab. Under Auto Read, have you speak by character, speak by character, speak by sentence am we're going to turn on the character at this point. Click okay and we're back to our document. And soy we're going to type the word "This." t-h-i-s. And is, and a space. It's saying each word as it is autos typed. We're going to finish off the sentence." a beautiful day".
[Screen Reader]: a beautiful day. This is a beautiful day.
When we hit the period T automatically reads the entire sentence back as well. So this is a really cool feature, very customizable. Some students want it to read both the words and the sentence. Some things are too much feedback and it'll read the sentence or the words. Some students don't use this at all. They prefer to wait until they're done and have it read back to them. A lot students have told me they like the sentence one because if they hit the closing punctuation, it automatically reads the sentence that is what they were saying. Depending on the type of learning disability they can have, that can be very important. I think I told you, the very first week about a man from another institution that came. He was spending hours on hours, trying to write essays for his program that he was in. He had to do two 3-page essays a week and spend hours upon hours for each one. When he used the speak as a type by sentence, he would type his sentence, and it would read it back to him at the end and he would catch a lot his errors simply because he was hearing it. And would fix a lot of it, while that thought was fresh in his mind, he knew what he wanted to say. It played it much easier for him to proof. Some people want to create it while it's right there, and that I know what they wanted to say. If that go back and play it back later, they may not knot remember what they were trying to say. Depending on the type of disability, the learning disability, depending on the person's writing and learning style, "speak as I type" may be very helpful. It may not be. It's something to practice and play with, just to give it a try. Any questions on the Speak As I Type Tool? Did I miss out?
All right. So next we're going to show you the word prediction tool this tool can be very helpful, not only for people with learning disabilities, but it can be helpful for people with physical disabilities, who struggle in using the key board, instead of having to type out every character, they can type just a character or two, to get an entire word. Years ago when I was still a student at the college, we had a student with severe physical disabilities, he had to use a pointing stick and type one character at a time on the key board and it was very slow for him. We got a word prediction program and started on the computer, and the disability services person decided to test T just to see how much, how much it would save in key strokes so she typed just a two-paragraph memo and just in that two-paragraph memo, it saved her, I believe it was 147 key strokes and to you and me, that doesn't sound like much. But when you think it takes student 10 to 20 seconds, to move from one key to another, and multiply that by 147, that's a significant time savings. Think about that in a two or three-page essay. You're really talking a lot of time saving. So Read and Writes not just for people with learning disabilities or reading disabilities but it can be very helpful for people with physical disabilities. I'm going to shut up and let Shaun demonstrate it for you.
So this is what it looks like when you do T. have you a drop-down menu, and you have some options in here. So I'll show what you this is going to look like. Adjusting the colors, along with changing the font and size and as far as how you want the words to be displayed. What we are going to use is stick to this one word ahead and some of the other options. Pretty standard. On and what we're going to do, we're going to insert the word click. And this will speak the word click and we're going to stick here with this you can speak when the mouse hovers over the word. Let's turn that on so we can hear the word when is it's happen, and not going to automatically speak the list because we don't want that to happen. The wait period before starting, we'll leave that at one second. If we were going to use this automatically speak. That way it's not immediately jumping into it and not having any spate in between, each word would be this next section of the pausing time between each word when it does this automatically read. But again we're not going to use that at this point. We'll see it pop up on the left side, and now we're going to start typing. To start off, we'll just do the same statement we just made about this being a beautiful day, although it's more of a beautiful, icy day out here on the left side have the different options. You can use the function keys 1-12 and we can also use the mouse and you will hear the word.
[Screen Reader]: take.
To.
On the received side, there's a bunch of green dots as well. Those are indicators of how likely it is that these words would make sense in this position. So we'll go ahead and work on finishing. The this, and go ahead and type the H. And now we can see this.
Practical Screen Reader [there, this, this.
It thinks now that "Is" would be a good option for our next word, which is it is. So I'm going to hit F1. Then A is our next word z. that would be F2 person
[Screen Reader]: A.
And beautiful is not in there so we have to start typing that one in. With one key stroke, typing out "Beautiful" which would be, about a 9-character word, we just hit B and F5, so those two characters. We get that whole word in there.
[Screen Reader]: beautiful day. This is a beautiful day.
So the word prediction, similar to our cell phones, I know most people have that word prediction similar to that. You get a lot more options. Have the footwork 1 through 12 and you have those options and that will be limited. If you are seeing red dots to the left, those are words you could end up using potentially, but this isn't a likely fit for that. Going you would like to add, Robert?
ROBERT: Do you want me to talk about the training? Okay. You can actually train the word prediction tool to know your writing style. So can you actually pull in documents that you've written in the past and Read and Write will learn your writing style. Then when you use Word Prediction. Can you use the phrase prediction and it can predict a whole phrase ahead, instead of predicting one word at a time, it may predict so when we put in this, it may put "Isa" because you use that word combination quite a bit. If you put in "Beautiful," B for beautiful, it might predict beautiful day because we have use today sentence. Again, it can be very time saving. A lot of times, that can be helpful for people that struggle spelling. They can get it started.
SEAN: Does the word prediction feature also work with HTML/web page from fields. And that question was from genie.
ROBERT: Yes, it does. So if you have word prediction turned on and you're on a web page where you're having to fill out a field, for example, if it's an application, and they want to know what your degree interest S instead of check boxes, have you to type out an essay or something. As you're typing T should do word prediction that's the intent of T. and reason I'm saying should, sometimes depending on the web browsers and how the web was created, it may not work as well as we would like for it to.
SEAN: All right. I think that is for the section.
ROBERT: I'm having to refer to Shaun for my notes today because my notes are over at the college.
SEAN: Okay. I went ahead and closed that. There we go. So we're going to look at the spell check in Read and Write at this point. So the spell check with read and writes really robust and you get a lot really cool features. It provides sample definitions and sample sentences and phonetic spellings, as well as characters typed. It used to be a whole a lot better, in my opinion, I think Robert would agree, a whole a lot better than office when it comes down to the spell check, but office has improved quite a bit. Office does have some definitions and it does better with the phonetic, but it doesn't quite get as robust as read and write does still. So just a couple Tied bids on the spellchecker. What we're going to do here is use this, file that Robert put together with us, for with a couple of spelling errors. Some interesting ones let's go ahead and click spell check. There we go. So it went and found the first word it has a problem W which is on the text, existed excited. Spelled with an "S" so over here, we have our spelling helper and one of cool features here, we get to hear each word as well. So we can go through.
[Screen Reader]: executed. Existed.
Until we hear the one that is sounds what it's supposed to be. X we have our definitions.
[Screen Reader]: excited. Make someone feel happy and energetic about something. I try not to excite the children too much, otherwise, they would never go to sleep.
SEAN: So it's pretty basic. Your words are still interlined in red. You'll see that over in the text. And you have a bunch of different options over here . change, change all. Add custom, auto correct and ignore. For this one, we are just going to do are regular change.
[Screen Reader]: spell check complete. [PLEASE STAND BY]
-
If that was a problem we had throughout the entire text, we would probably want to do a change all and go that route. It automatically moves on to the next word. So now, we have about spelled. And first option, of course on the spelling helper, is the contract spelling of that here, we have serve as S-u-r-r-v-e. Sandwiches. So we're just going to go ahead and it want once it's done. You'll see that early is back to normal. I'm going to go ahead and mess up another word here.
[Screen Reader]: spell check completed. Spell check complete completed.
SEAN. I'm not sure why it's not -- sorry. I messed up a different word. Yeah we're going to also turn down the we're just going to open that back up. I just closed it and opened it back up. There we go. Okay. So where are we at? About ... (pause) trying to do it to get the add custom feature. But it's note wanting to give me options.
ROBERT: Did you close it down altogether.
[Screen Reader]: spell check completed.
SEAN: Let me try this one more time real fast.
[Screen Reader]: spell check completed. Spell check completed.
SEAN: Sorry about this. We're going to close read and write.
ROBERT: I don't think I've ever seen this do this before okay. Read and writes loading. (Pause).
All right. As you'll see, all those words I added into the custom. I was expecting a box to pop up when that happened. We're going to go back through, that's why it was getting mad at us. So when you use a word that is spelled right, you don't want it to show up, do you that, add custom and it will automatically take care of that for you. I thought it used to have another dialogue box, but apparently, I was wrong. So now, if we want it actually spelled ABOUT. We do that at cut O. the next time we run this spell check, it won't show up. But Word will have it show up with the Word version of the spell check. So I add custom feature. Apparently it got simpler, or I forgot got about it how it worked. You just ad a that. You jump into the drop down and then your spelling options, you'll see those additional characteristics, and you can also just add in your own words as well. So now that I have just spelled J-u-s-t-t".
Word will show it when you read.) and write spell check, it will not recognize that word as being misspelled -- Word will show it when you read it, and write spell check. It will not recognize that word. We're going to get rid of those because we do not want those in here. So you can see, and of course, there is the ignore and an auto correct. So the auto correct changed our excited, e-i-x-it-t-e-d. To the correct spelling. In the future F we are writing -- L it didn't take it. We need to turn that on. And apparently, that the not -- hang on a second. We're going to try it again. Auto correct. Now we're going to try it.
Okay we're going to try a couple different things.
Yeah. It's not wanting to ... (pause).
We're going to try this with another word. The T-h-a one we want to be "They." and then auto correct. And you'll see it changes in the document. So in the future when we type in -- it should be automatically adjusting but for some reason right now, it isn't.
ROBERT: What he was doing, you type in a word, for example, "Thay" and that's a word you commonly misspell, you struggle that word, you always misspell it. You just can't get it straight in your mind. So you can tell it, the spell check comes up and says Thay isn't correct and click in the spelling list, "they" and you click auto correct and from that point on, Read and Write should automatically, when you type in "Thay" should change it to "They" for you. But for some reason, it isn't working today as expected. But I know it works because I have a couple of students who outside that auto correct on some words and "Thay" was one of the words that one was giving her trouble. She use that would word: That's I didn't use that example.
SEAN: I turned on the type feature, hoping that might have something to do with why it's not wanting T. but the Spell as I Type is a cool feature. It makes adjustments as you're typing. If you're not just proof reading a document that you've already typed. If you start typing and see some issues, it will automatically pop up." they" then they switch over to they. And we have that option to do it, while we're typing, instead of typing everything out and going through later, and doing the proof reading that way. So just another option there, and I apologize again for why it's not legislate us set up the auto correct properly. I'm running through some notes to see if there's something that I'm missing.
ROBERT: And you can add word to the dictionary, for example, a proper name, you spell it a certain wake Read and Write doesn't recognize it's spelled that way but you can add it to the dictionary and add word to the word prediction dictionary. I forgot to mention that a moment ago. Z for example, if you're going to be writing a r a paper on a specific topic that uses a lot of jargon or term that is Read and Write doesn't recognize, you could add a word list to the word prediction and to spell check it will recognize those words automatically and not make you correct each one as you go, and all of that. And there are also some word prediction dictionaries already created for things like science and medical, that will help.
SEAN: All right. So that's it for the spellchecker. Homophones.
ROBERT: All right. We're going to reload our document, the party document for Bob and Lisa. Homophones, as you probably know, two or more word that is sound the same but sound different but have different meanings. Such as to, 2, too, their, there, meet, meat, all that kind of stuff. Those are also confusable words that people may struggle with. Word that is sound kind of the same, not exactly the same but can sound enough that they can be confusable Read and Write allows you to check for those and there's a drop down menu besides the homo -- homophones, and you can change if it looks for confusables or not. And you can adjust the settings. I won't go through all of those, but I'll give you the basic stuff it does. So anyway, we have our document. If you click the sounds like or get homophones button on the toolbar, it's going to very much like the -- look very much like the spellchecker window. This time, it's not looking for spelling. It's looking for homophones. It has a list of two hundred 50 some-out homophones, and by default, it's going to check for all of them F. it am consist across one you don't struggle with, you can tell it to ignore that one in the future and it won't keep checking that homophone. So the first time or two a person uses this, it may be overwhelming. But as you use that ignore in the future or -- yeah." always ignore." if you use the "Always ignore" option, it'll unmark ma word in the homo phone list and won't check that word all the time. You can always go back and add it in later if you decide, yup, I do struggle with this one. First one that comes across is our or are or. This is not one we struggle with. So we're going to tell it to always ignore. So in the future, it shouldn't check that one. What's the next there; their, they're are our three homophones here. Can I click on the word in my list and click the play button and it'll read the word. Their.
Or click in the definition area, and click the play button.
[Screen Reader]:
I already switched it to the their so it will read that definition.
There show that is something belongs to something. It is their car. Used to talk about a plate, it's over there. We went there last week.
ROBERT: So that gives you the things you want to hear and we know we want the other one, the possessive, rather than the location one so click that one, and click the change button. And it'll move to the next one. It marks these in blue as opposed to red for spelling errors or green for grammatical errors. When it marks it in blue, it indicates this is something different than what you usually get. So people won't confuse us with spellchecker.
So knight. Or I like to say the ka-nights. Night and knight can be homophones and we can we want the one without the K. So we're going to click the always ignore button on this one. Did I have it spelled wrong?
SEAN: No. Which is good, we'll pick up all the correct once incorrect ones. Now, to their.
ROBERT: So this is another homophone, this is not correct because this is the possessive and we want the contraction "They are." so we'll select that one and click change. For me, this is not a homo phone so I'm going to tell it to always ignore. Because it should be "To" as opposed to "Too" or "2" -- "Two".
[Overlapping Speakers]
It's hard for me to remember what errors I made and what I didn't. Sorry. So again, basically, you see what's happening. It's finding words that can be considered as confusables or as homophones, marking them and double check to make sure you are using the correct words. I think I've covered early. So I'll turn it back over to Sean.
SEAN: One of the things we wanted to do is Speech Input B. working at Robert's place today and not having been train bod this microphone or just not having been trained on it, and it works similar to Dragon T works best if you are able to train on it and use it whereas my home computer or the computer at KCKCC I've been able to do some training on, and it worked much better there. I don't want really want to attempt to try to read in here, and see what happens, and have it become all jumbled. So we'll just talk about it a little bit. And I'll show you the video that Read and Write has about the for it. I can use the pitch input feature before when I've done some typing, and it works really well, once you've done some training. So I'll be go able to talk. Another thing I found was really cool was the ability to navigate between programs, and switching everything, and there's just a lot really good commands that can you learn to switch between programs. I didn't have any problem. And I have no need to use speech input system. But I was still able to navigate around Windows explorer and Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, bolding, and using different fonts, changing colors of want to. Just with a lot key of aspects, learning commands that differ between like correct that or delete that, and just knowing what all those are. List of commands we're not going to talk about that too much, but I am going to show you a quick video on the speech input. And this is what the speech input icon looks like. Then you have some information, here, as far as the microphone training and the profiles have you available. For now, we're just jump over here and time our speech input video.
So the speech input video is from the Read and Write dropdown menu. It has a list of all of them. It's the fourth item down.
VIDEO: The speech input feet in your read and write links to make soft's speech recognition feature. This converts the word that you speak, into text in your document. Before using the speech input, you should check your microphone is in the correct position and working correctly. To do this, click here and select open microphone training. This simple wizard takes you through a step by step process to check your microphone. To improve the accuracy of the speech input, you should completely some speech recognition training. The more training that you do, the more accurate the speech input will be. To carry out training, click here and select open speech recognition training. Again there is a simple wizard that takes you throughout training. The first training includes tips for using speech recognition once you have completed the training, and are ready to use the speech input, cling on this icon. The speech recognizer appears and shows that it is listening for you to speak. Simply speak what you want to write, and the text will be placed into the document. Click on this icon to stop and start the speech recognizer. That is the speech input and a pretty cool feature.
It's also just a lot of fun to tell your computer what to do and have it respond and do the things you tell it to do. Robert, going to add on that?
ROBERT. T. does appear, Microsoft Speech has cut out some of the features it used to have. In the past versions of read and write, when we have used this, it was very, very comparable to Dragon actually speaking. It doesn't appear that that's really the case anymore. I think it's got more to do with the Microsoft speech & there are versions of Windows, as opposed to Read and Write. I haven't gotten to check that yet want but I'm thinking, if you use Windows 7, you live more features than you do with Read and Write 11 on windows 10. But I could be wrong on that. That's just what I'm thinking, it has more to do with the Microsoft speech than read and write. But we haven't had a chance to play with that and test that theory yet. Okay. Is that everything for today. Wow this goes so much fast er we're not doing hands-on. So. All right. We will hope for questions. We have about 13 minutes, 12 minutes. Something like that. We will open up for questions. And you can either type in the chat window or if you have a microphone raise your hand, and we can unmute your mic and we'll let you talk. And see what questions we have.
(pause).
Doesn't look like we have any new questions.
ROBERT: Next week, we will be look at the study skills tools ^, and the research tools. Read and Write has some cool features I think are great, to allow you to build a vocabulary list, make notes, even summarize material so you don't have to read a 20 page article to find out if it's got the information you want. Researching on the Internet, things of that nature. We'll be covering those tools, specifically the hitters, fact finder, fact folder. Potentially, fact mapper if we get a chance to make sure it's working on my system at work. Fact mapper is a writing tool. We put it with the other two fact items for Fact Mapper -- I mean, Fact Folder and Fact Folder next week. So we kept those together with the study search and research tools. Those we will be look at next week to cover for session 4 and that will wrap up the things that we're covering in this 4-part series.
If you have any questions or going you would like specifically to be demonstrated in those tools, if you have any idea what they are and have going specifically you want to see, send me an E-mail between next week and we will try to make sure we cover that feature in next week's webinar. And as always, if you have questions over going we have covered today or the last two weeks, you can send myself or Sean E-mails and we'll be happy to try to explain in further detail or give you more resources. And with Read and Write, the speech input, what I said about it not being as powerful, probably is not as a significant deal, unless have you someone with physical impairments, and they are wanting to control computer bye by voice, which I've had a couple of people do that. They couldn't afford actual dragon speaking but we gave them Read and Write and it worked beautifully for them so that they didn't have to drop money into Dragon actually speaking, which is significantly cheaper now than it used to be. But with the fact that Speech Input does allow dictation into a document, a person can dictate what they're wanting to write. That was the primary reason for having speech input in Read and Write Gold to begin with. So all the other features were icing on the cake. It does allow a person to speak what they're wanting to type. That's the primary goal of having speech input in the read and Write tool so should be could dictate rather than type or hand write out, what they're wanting to say.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is a good opportunity for people to go back and [indiscernible] things you need. But it's a good chance for questions. [indiscernible]
Beach2018/resources.htm.
[Microphone distortion]
First two weeks are up there. With the whole recording the audio, the captions. You can do in a number of different ways and by tomorrow, or the latest Thursday, this recording should be up there, too. So take this opportunity this week use next week to help review and catch up of the so thank you again gentlemen. Another good job, and we'll see everywhere next week.
ROBERT: Thank you, Norm for having us.