ATC Quickstart: TextAloud
IT Connect > Accessibility > ATC > Quickstar: TextAloud
TextAloud (NextUp) is one of the speech output programs offered in the ATC. Unlike other programs, most of its options are available via the main interface.
Starting TextAloud
- StepsActions
- Click the Start button in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.
- Click ATL.
- Click TextAloud
Using TextAloud
TextAloud can open a variety of filetypes, including: doc (and docx), rtf, txt, html, and pdf. When trying to open a PDF, be aware that TextAloud does not do OCR (optical Character Recognition) - the PDF needs to be accessible. To get around this you must preform OCR on it using either the OCR capabilities in Adobe Acrobat (which is on all computers in the ATL) or covert it using ABBYY FineReader.
- StepsActions
- Click on the Open icon, or press <ctrl> + <O>
- Once loaded, do a sample of the voice, and reading speed - adjust if needed.
- Click one of the two Speak buttons to start reading.
Hints
- Voices
-
The ATL offers a variety of voices to use with TextAloud, if you are new to speech output, you may wish to spend few minutes testing the voices.
- HotKeys
-
You can customize which keys need to be pressed to preform common TextAloud actions.
Help
To access help, select the Help option under the Help menu, or press <F1>. For additional help, contact ATC staff.
