Use ReadSpeaker and YuJa Panorama Together For Better Academic Accessibility

Your passion as an educator is helping your students succeed. Whatever it takes—no matter the learning limitations, physical or cognitive disabilities, or other challenges your students may face—you want to give them the tools and the ability to learn the best way they can.

In many cases, that means providing your students with assistive technology like ReadSpeaker’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine or YuJa Panorama.

These are just two options in the broad scope of assistive technology, but they work together to level the playing field of educational content. Keep reading to see how you can give every student the optimal learning experience by making both tools available.

How ReadSpeaker And YuJa Panorama Can Help Your Students Learn More Effectively

First of all, what is YuJa Panorama?

Panorama is a suite of accessibility enhancement tools that integrate with the major learning management systems. If your school uses Brightspace, Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, or another popular LMS solution, Panorama might be worth checking out.

The platform provides accessibility assessments that let you know when you need to change your content to help your students with disabilities see, hear, or understand lessons more easily. It may flag problems such as small font sizes, low color contrast, or a lack of descriptive headers, among other issues.

Flagged issues will show up color-coded by type and severity, so you’ll know right away if there’s an urgent accessibility problem you need to fix. Finally, you can view and resolve any flagged accessibility issues using the text editor within your LMS of choice; there’s no need to work across multiple platforms and risk uploading the wrong version of your finished document.

Panorama also automatically generates alternate versions of all uploaded documents for enhanced accessibility. This is especially helpful if your students use assistive technology that requires the content to be in a specific format. Panorama can convert content to HTML, High Contrast, Audio Podcast, Plain Text, Tagged PDF, Electronic Braille, EPUB, and Text to speech on the web, so your students can view or listen to their work however best fits their needs.

If your students wish to enlarge the text, change the font, highlight parts of speech, or customize other aspects that help them read the lesson more easily, they can do that within the LMS platform using Panorama’s Immersive Reader feature, without having to download a third-party application.

What is ReadSpeaker?

ReadSpeaker is a text-to-speech (TTS) engine that brings written text to life as spoken audio. The platform offers a highly customizable experience to users across the spectrum of learning abilities:

• Students with ADHD might select a passage to be read aloud in a clear, soothing voice to help them focus on an important concept, for example.
• Dyslexic learners might want to turn up the reading speed and quickly run through a lesson to make sure they didn’t misunderstand any crucial information on the first read-through.
• Students with visual impairments can hear entire pages of content—including body text, headers, image alt text, and even math equations—spoken slowly enough for them to construct a mental image of the page layout and the concepts they need to understand.

Like Panorama, ReadSpeaker integrates directly with most LMS solutions. This means students can access audio assistance right there within the LMS window. ReadSpeaker works seamlessly on any web content, which means students can get the extra reading assistance wherever they go on the web—even outside your LMS. And they don’t need to worry about downloading additional programs or configuring plugins.

Why should you combine ReadSpeaker with Panorama for the best user experience?

Panorama’s accessibility features are incredibly useful for educators creating online lessons and homework. Using Panorama’s tools, you can make sure your content is visually understandable for the majority of your students.

However, sometimes visual modifications aren’t enough. High-contrast colors and large font sizes may not help students with certain disabilities, such as dyslexia, visual impairments, or visual processing disorders. Offering spoken audio from ReadSpeaker is the best way to make sure these students are on equal footing with the rest of their class.

While YuJa Panorama does have a limited read-aloud feature—Smart Speaker—it requires installation of a browser extension for some LMSs and for any external web page. It also doesn’t work with all content sources. ReadSpeaker, on the other hand, does not require your students to install or configure any tools, and it’s seamless across almost any LMS, web, document, or mobile platform.

ReadSpeaker is great for students who have ADHD, dyslexia, or other difficulties, because it allows playback of selected text. That means students can listen to the audio version of any content they’re struggling to understand as many times as they need to with the simple click of the play button.

 

Ready to see how ReadSpeaker gives your students the learning boost they need?

Going through school with dyslexia, ADHD, low vision, or visual processing disabilities is tough. Some students spend so much time trying to compensate for their troubles learning that they don’t have the energy left over to actually learn.

At ReadSpeaker, text-to-speech is what we live and breathe. We want to make sure every student has the ability to hear their school work spoken out loud whenever, wherever, and however they may need it. We offer ReadSpeaker WebReader for web content, ReadSpeaker DocReader for documents, and ReadSpeaker TextAid for pretty much everything else, including use on Android and Apple phones. We also integrate seamlessly with all major LMS systems, including cloud-based software.

Using ReadSpeaker, students can leap their hurdles effortlessly and participate at an equal level with their peers. No more struggling desperately to understand and catch up—just clear, seamless audio assistance, right where your students need it, on every platform.