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Mission

The mission of the Department for Disability Support Services is to provide to individuals with disabilities support services that will enable them to access programs, services, facilities, and activities of the university; to enhance disability awareness among students, staff, and faculty; and to provide academic courses.

Assistive Technology

This pages is a work in progress and is very informal and not very organized. It is a list of assistive technology offered at ECU and other free/inexpensive technology and information.

Software List

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

• ABBYY FineReader is a much better OCR program then what is built in to Microsoft Office and Kurzweil. So far I believe FineReader is better then OmniPage Pro.
• OmniPage Pro is a much better OCR program then what is built in to Microsoft Office and Kurzweil.

Screen Readers

• Window-Eyes by GW Micro is a screen reader. Window-Eyes cost between $600 and $800.
• JAWS by Freedom Scientific is a screen reader offered in the labs. JAWS cost between $900 and $1100.

Text-To-Speech (TTS)

Text-To-Speech includes document and webpage readers

• MathPlayer 2.0 is the ONLY product that I have found that can read math expressions. It can read MathML on webpages.
• Microsoft Speech Server
• Microsoft Agent can be used to read text along with other things. This technology can be used by other applications and webpages to make them talk.
• Natural Voice Reader is free and can be used to read most documents and webpages. It is a good option for people with mild ADD/ADHD or LD. You can buy it with better voices (AT&T Natural Voice) for $29.50 or $39.50. Once you buy it you can use the voices with other programs such as JAWS or Kurzweil.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS)

• WYNN by Freedom Scientific reads text, is a document editor, and can convert printed documents to text. The Reader version cost $430 and Wizard (scan/read) version cost $1000.
• WYNN can be used to for OCR, reading text, document editor. The Reader version cost $430 and Wizard (scan/read) version cost $1000.
• Kurzweil 1000 will be offered in the labs. It is geared towards people that are blind and visually impairments disabilities. It can scan and convert (OCR) paper documents to text and then read them out loud TTS. The application cost about $1000.
• Kurzweil 3000 will be offered in the labs. It is geared towards people with learning disabilities. Have to pay more to have the ability to scan and convert (OCR) paper documents to text and then read them out loud TTS. The Read version cost about $350, the Scan/Read black and white version cost about $1000, and the Scan/Read color version cost about $1900.

General Office

• Adobe Reader 7 has a text to speech function built in. Version 7 now has much better accessibility options. PDF files can be accessible but are usually not created properly. Try to get tagged PDF files.
• Microsoft Office XP and 2003 have support for voice recognition, OCR, and TTS built in. Microsoft Office can be used for basic scanning and converting of documents. It is based off of ScanSoft's OmniPage software and to upgrade it cost about $150.
• OpenOffice.org This is a complete office program and it includes word prediction. It can also be used to create webpages along with many other very customizable features.

Voice Recognition

• IBM ViaVoice
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking

Captioning

• Alignment Studio automatically synchronizes a transcript to an audio file or audio track of a video.
• CaptionMaker can be used for manual synchronization with audio or video and output to VHS tapes through special hardware.

Web Page Creation

List of sites that has information on creating web pages, specifically accessible web pages.

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.
• Getting started with HTML
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (Checklist)
• HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
• XHTML Basic
• MathML
• XHTML + MathML + SVG/
• WebAIM Section 508 Checklist
• DevGuru has "Quick References" for many programing and markup languages used in web design.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Tutorials and Layouts Information
• Tapio Markula CSS Guide
• bluerobot.com CSS Layout
• Mezzoblue has lots of CSS stuff, including CSS Zen Garden (below).
• CSS Zen Garden has very good examples of CSS layouts that people have created and you can use.
• HTML Tidy is used by many applications to clean up HTML code and make it standards compliant. This includes making them more accessible.
• HTML-Kit is a full-featured editor designed to help HTML, XHTML and XML authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. It supports MANY plugins, including HTML Tidy. I used it to create this site.
• WAVE 3.0 Accessibility Tool

Resources and Information

• Captioning and Subtitling Multimedia
• Basic JAWS Tutorials These are free and in mp3 audio and text format.
• All JAWS Tutorials Must buy on tape.
• HTML Challenge Learn how to use JAWS to read HTML better.
• The National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education has information and training on accessible information technology. The FAQ page is a good place to start.
• The Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology has information about electronic and information technology and universal design.
• A very good video on Making Distance Learning Accessible to Everyone.
• CSUN Center On Disabilities
• HOW TO: Use the Language Bar in Windows XP
• Language Bar is used for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and Input Method Editors (IME)

Template For DSS

This is the template that the DSS website is based on. There are more style sheets that are used to change they colors and font sizes.

• Main HTML template
• CSS layout
• CSS color
• CSS size
• CSS misc

Test Pages

These are pages that I am using to test XHTML, CSS, MathML, and other things.

• Style Test
• Style CSS Test
• Options Style Test
• Options Style Test

East Carolina University
Disability Support Services
Slay 138
Greenville, NC 27858-4353
252-737-1016 (Voice/TTY)
252-737-1025 (Fax)