bbaccess

There are two products that Cleveland State is licensing to provide greater document accessibility in Blackboard for course content and documents.

ReadSpeaker for Blackboard

Cleveland State is licensing the text to speech application ReadSpeaker which is integrates with Blackboard for reading course content for students. With this application any student can easily have content in their Blackboard courses read out loud. The ReadSpeaker application works in Respondus Lockdown Browser for reading exams. Read&Write currently does not work as well in that environment. People who use ReadSpeaker have access to 2 US English voices (female and male) and can adjust the speech rate. Below are some links that demonstrate the functions of ReadSpeaker.

• ReadSpeaker SoftChalk Interactive Tutorial
• ReadSpeaker Training for Blackboard Videos
• ReadSpeaker docReader: How-To Videos

The Translation, Dictionary, and MP3 features of ReadSpeaker are disabled for CSU. This is because we are not able to stop them from appearing in Blackboard exams unless the features are disabled for our entire site.

Blackboard Ally

There are also accessibbility options which are made available by the Blackboard integration of Blackboard Ally. This is a tool for checking document accessibility and contains options for document format conversion. You can use the Alternative format option of Blackboard Ally in order to convert files into formats like Word, HTML, PDF, ePub, and MP3.