Cindy has a project underway that involves developing educational resources that ESL students can use from iPods. She has been exploring Text to Speech conversion programs that create audio files.
Here is one example. CK’s Text to Speech takes advantage of the built-in conversion capabilities of the Macintosh. The applescripts convert from selected text in Safari, from a text file, and from the clipboard.
The content read to you here can be viewed on our participatory web site. It is a web page with bullet points, headings and images that may not make the most comprehensible audio presentation, but is fairly typical of an extended web page.
The Macintosh reads text as part of the basic operating system. I have not explored the text to speech capabilities in some time and found the quality to be quite impressive. The connected file allows you to judge for yourself. What is different about this application is the generation of an audio file that can be used in other ways (e.g., used as part of a web page, offloaded to an MP3 player). There are other programs that perform this same function and perhaps do so in a slightly easier way (not requiring multiple scripts/programs). The advantage of the resource we link to is that it is available at no cost.
