These are mostly, but not exclusively, visually impaired students. ReadOut is designed to be used with most types of MS-DOS PC access programs, particularly synthetic speech screen readers. It can be used as a simple text browser, but has advanced features for more experienced computer users. Its innovative feature is the linking of text on the screen to human voice recordings of same material. Students can use the power of the computer to navigate through long and complex text, then switch to the human voice which is more comfortable.
Students can choose which medium to use, depending on the current study task.
A course is typically delivered on a series of CD-ROMs, each with up to 15 hours of audio files, but with the whole of the text for reference. The next development is a Windows95 version of the program. This will be integrated with the development of a digital recording system for producing audio cassettes of the same material. Project Director Professor Tom Vincent Project Team Mary Taylor Chris Valentine Dr. Kevin Quick .