Quality Matters Reviews

          Quality Matters Reviews 

some suggestions for visual and hearing components

By Grace Windsheimer      gwindsheimer@cgcc.cc.or.us

One of the ongoing issues in passing the Quality Matters rubric, is #8.2, visual and hearing impaired students. There are actually court cases against colleges right now from students who feel they don't have access to online courses because of their disability. Here is the information on the court cases for you. http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Students-Demand-Access/125695/ 

Visually Impaired
I found a ppt reader that students can download. Tried it and it reads both ppt (2003) and pptx (2007) text, so I'll be adding that to my Moodle pages for students to download if they choose.
Here is the link to the PowerTalk download-easy to download and use.
http://fullmeasure.co.uk/powertalk/#requirements

Here are some links to screen readers: from Linda Hughitt

• http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
• http://www.nch.com.au/verbose/index.html

Free screen readers:

• http://www.datafurnace.net.au/sayzme/
• http://speakcomputers.com/

Listing of programs:

•           http://speechcomputing.com/texttospeech

Hearing impaired
I also try to find videos with CC (closed captions) to add to my Moodle shells for the hearing impaired-they are getting easier to find.   Here is a web page with closed caption videos   http://www.google.com/search?q=is:free&tbs=vid:1,cc:1 You can also search on YouTube for cc videos. Here are some videos on You Tube for CGCC  http://www.youtube.com/cgcclive that have automatic captions.

Try them out, they actually are done quite nicely and for those that are hard to hear for all of us it is a great alternative.