CLiCk,Speak for Firefox 3.

I was pretty excited when Firefox 3 came out a couple of weeks ago, but my excitement waned when I realized some of the best accessibility features, such as Accessibar, CLiCk, Speak and FireVox weren't ready to go yet. Today Paul Hamilton at Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education shared that one of these Firefox add-ons, CLiCK, Speak is ready! After some checking I discovered that Fire Vox and Accessibar are also ready.

CLiCk,Speak is a free Firefox Add-On that enables someone to put the cursor where you want to begin reading and click the green button, then click the red button to stop. Another option is to highlight a section and click the white button.

To adjust the CLiCK, Speak options go to Firefox ‘Tools’ then to ‘CliCk,Speak Options’. You can change the reading rate and the pitch of the voice.

I have had students with various disabilities from Down's syndrome to cerebral palsy with intellectual impairment use CLiCK, Speak to better access the web

Fire Vox is "an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox... . All Fire Vox commands are keyboard activated. In addition, the keyboard commands can be easily reconfigured in the self-voicing Fire Vox Options menu to avoid conflicts with other accessibility software products or to suit personal preferences. For sighted users who need a screen reader, such as web developers interested in testing their webpages or educators who work with visually impaired students, Fire Vox's highlighting feature makes it easy to keep track of where it is reading from on a page. This highlighting feature is also useful for dyslexic users and partially sighted users."

Here is a great tip for using Fire Vox with single switch users to listen to (and read along with highlighting) online texts and e-books in the Firefox browser. CTRL+Shift+F is the hot key combination for "read next chunk", if you use a configurable switch interface (such as Joy Box USB or X-Keys), using a macro or joy to key software and set the switch to CTRL+Shift+F, then a student can have the computer read the website or e-book paragraph by paragraph by pressing a switch to advance. If you prefer sentence by sentence reading you can enter the Fire Vox menu option by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M and then turn on "read by sentence".

Accessibar is an (almost) full accessibility add-on for Fire Fox. It allows you to change the text and back ground color to any of 70 choices, change the font and font size, the link spacing, hide the graphics (including flash) and read aloud with a single click. It is complex for our most involved students, so usually it is best to train paraprofessionals and peer tutors to use Accessibar to set up the web it is more accessible for some students.

Free Accessible Web Browsers for Learners with Multiple Disabilities

WWAAC (seen left top)
Has: integrated speech (tts and talking buttons), some picture symbol support, summarize feature to lower cognitive load, customizable interface using layout editor
Access Methods: mouse, mouse emulator, switch scanning (one or two), touch screen
OS: not specified on their web site



EdWeb
(seen left bottom)
Has: tts/talking buttons, full symbol support (you must use free software to integrate your own picture symbol set), simple interface to lower cognitive load, comprehensive manual for download
Access methods: mouse, touch screen, mouse emulator, switch scanning (one or two) with Grid Editor add on software (free)
OS: Windows 98-XP
Notes: it takes a bit of effort and set up to get EdWeb the way you want it, but once you do it is great! Also it works with the free EdWord symbol/talking word processor and the free software to integrate your symbol set and create grids (like Clicker 4/5 or Classroom Suite)

Multi Web
Has: tts, enlarged print, highlight text, talking buttons, customizable interface
Does not have: picture symbol support
Access method: mouse, joystick, touch screen, switch scanning
OS: Windows
Notes: works with Multi Mail e-mail program

Notes:
Don't forget that Firefox and Opera have many, many options to make them more accessible such as the Firefox Accessibility Tool Bar and Click, Speak.

And I did not include any of the many free accessible browsers for users who are Blind/Visually Impaired, like WebbIE, please use Google or search OATsoft to find these if that is what you need.

Some photo editing for this post was done with the free Pixenate Web 2.0 application.