TTS - Educational Implications

Students today are engaged in a complex multi-media environment. Within their daily interactions, they engage in text, images, video, animation and sound. Students are accustomed to receiving and sharing information in a variety of multi-media formats. In contrast, students spend a great deal of classroom time viewing print materials and listening to teachers. Printed text is a "one-size-fits-all" while students’ strengths, needs and interests are very diversified. For students with reading challenges, this printed information in the classroom is often a barrier to successful learning.

Text-to-speech (TTS) supports reading and writing by enabling the user to see the text that is displayed and simultaneously to hear it spoken aloud. This has implications for a variety of situations, such as researching on the Internet, reading email, and writing and editing reports with greater ease. Students with reading difficulties may benefit from taking classroom tests on the computer with TTS enabled. Some programs also allow the student to hear what they type as a support for completing their answers on a test as well as hearing the questions read aloud. Textbooks and other supplemental reading materials in a digital format can reduce word recognition problems so that a student can focus on comprehension of information. These potential benefits can be further enhanced when text-to-speech is combined with other technology supports, such as word prediction, study tools and spell check.

Free, inexpensive and commercially produced speech synthesizing programs are readily available and can be made accessible within a classroom environment. School district administrators and classroom teachers need to commit to learning about text-to-speech programs and the potential benefits for their students.