One of the requests from the staff who attended the Digital Papers Focus Group meeting in October 2011 was for SQA to provide answer booklets in Microsoft Word format. While answer booklets have been provided as PDF documents, some staff felt that the Word format would be more suitable for some candidates. You can now download answer booklets in Word / DOC format from the SQA web site.

The main advantage of using PDF answer booklets with Adobe Reader is that candidates can use the same program to access both question paper and answer booklet. However, disadvantages of the PDF answer booklets are: 

• Each page contains a separate text box for the answer and the candidate's text does not automatically flow from one page to another.
• The font and size are fixed, and formatting is basic.
• Inserting symbols, formulae and equations is awkward.
• Drawing tools are basic.
• PDFaloud text-to-speech software does not highlight the text in the answer booklet as it reads, and it reads the whole page - you can't just read a sentence, word or paragraph.

• Word is a much better word processor than an Adobe Reader text box! The candidate can change fonts, sizes, styles, use formatting etc etc.
• Symbols, formulae, equations and diagrams can be easily inserted.
• A wider range of text-to-speech programs can be used to read out your answers, including the free WordTalk reader.
• Speech recognition can be used to dictate into Word, including the free Windows 7 speech recognition software.
• Support tools for mind-mapping, spellchecking and word prediction (if permitted by SQA) tend to work better with Word than Adobe Reader.

The new Scottish male computer voice is now available for download from CALL's web site. 'Stuart' works with most text-to-speech programs including for example ClaroRead, Co:Writer, PDFaloud, Penfriend, Read and Write Gold and WordTalk.

However, if you install Stuart on your computer, you won't see it in the list of voices offered by PDFaloud. This is because PDFaloud offers you voices from a list of 'safe voices' that have been tested with PDFaloud. This doesn't necessarily mean another voice won't work - it may just mean that Texthelp haven't tested it. Since Stuart is brand new, he isn't in the safe voices list and so you won't see him.

You can add Stuart to the safe voices list by opening the 'safevoices.ini' file that is usually to be found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\plug_ins\Texthelp, adding the voice, and then saving the file again.

Step 1: Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\plug_ins\Texthelp and double click on "safevoice.ini" so that it opens in Notepad.

Step 2: Scroll down to the bottom of the list and type in "CereVoice Stuart - English (Scotland)". Make sure the name of the voice that you type in is exactly as it appears in the Speech tab of the Windows Control Panel.

Step 3: Save the file.

Step 4: Restart Adobe Reader and Stuart should now be in the PDFaloud list of voices.

Step 5: Enjoy reading your digital papers with a bloke's voice ;).

A common question we get from staff, parents and students is "Can I use speech recognition software to dictate my answers into the computer in an examination?" and so SQA funded us to spend some time trying to answer this. We've written a report with the results of the tests we've carried out on Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Windows 7 speech recognition, and WordQ+SpeakQ and you can download it from here.

We found that:

The accuracy and reliability of speech recognition software has improved considerably in recent years and all the programs tested were functional and seemed effective when dictating into a word processor. So if you want to use speech recognition to dictate extended answers into Microsoft Word for the Standard Grade English Writing paper, or Higher History, for example, then all of the programs can be used.

However, Windows speech recognition is not functional for dictating into SQA digital question papers, and so we do not recommend it for use in examinations unless the candidate is only intending to dictate into a word processor.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the most well known speech recognition program and can be used to dictate into both digital question papers and to a word processor. It is probably the most accurate, is relatively easy to train and use and gives voice control over formatting and over the computer in general. Dragon has text-to-speech for reading back the dictated text, and the Premium version can also play back a recording of the dictation to help with finding and correcting errors. For single user copies, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium is available with an educational discount (£68) and the 100-user Professional school license at £895 would seem to be relatively good value for schools who wish to make the software available to a large number of pupils. The educational discounts are availabel through Pugh or Dyslexic.com.

WordQ + SpeakQ is speech recognition software specifically designed for users who have difficulties with literacy. It uses the Windows speech recognition system, but accessed using a different, simpler interface. It has text-to-speech to help get through the training process; it can read back each phrase as it is dictated; it has text-to-speech for proof-reading; and it provides word prediction. SpeakQ can be used to dictate into SQA digital papers and also to word processors. WordQ + SpeakQ is arguably simpler to use than Dragon and the integrated text-to-speech and word prediction does make it a more attractive option for writers with reading and writing difficulties. WordQ + SpeakQ requires use of the keyboard and so it is not suitable for users who wish to control the computer completely by voice. A single user license for WordQ + SpeakQ is £199 and a site licence is £1995 from Assistive Solutions.

Speech recognition software may have considerable potential to enable some candidates to work independently and to rely less on scribes, and we are thinking it would be useful to organise some trials in schools to investigate this potential and to look at the practicalities of using speech recognition in exams. If you are interested please contact us.

TextHelp, publishers of Read and Write Gold and PDFaloud, have decided that they will no longer sell PDFaloud as a standalone program. Since 2008, Scottish schools have been able to buy a site licence for PDFaloud for £295 from Learning and Teaching Scotland, under a special licencing deal. We helped set up this scheme because we felt that PDFaloud was a simple and easy to use tool for reading digital exams and other PDFs, and £295 for a secondary school licence we felt was relatively good value. I believe that Education Scotland still have two boxed sets still in stock so contact them quick if you want to get PDFaloud.

So, what are the alternatives if you want to have your digital papers or PDF textbooks read out by the computer? Here are some of the options:

Adobe Reader Read Out Loud

Adobe Reader has a basic built-in free text reader. Click on View > Read Out Loud > Activate Read Out Loud. You can listen to the current page or the whole paper but a better method is to choose the ‘Select’ tool (Tools > Select and Zoom > Select Tool) and then click on some text. Read Out Loud will read the text where you have clicked. It won’t highlight the words, it usually reads a whole paragraph (and you can’t tell it to only read a sentence or individual word) but it’s free and built in to Adobe Reader.

Read and Write Gold

TextHelp's Read and Write Gold includes PDFaloud, and some schools or local authorities already have Read and Write Gold.  You need Read and Write Gold 8.1 or later because earlier versions can't read from Adobe Reader 8 or 9. Read and Write Gold can read from anything, not just PDFs, and the program has lots of other tools for suporting reading, writing and studying. However, Read and Write Gold is more expensive than PDFaloud at £320 for a single user licence, £1,150 for a primary site and £1,995 for a secondary site. TextHelp are offering to upgrade a secondary PDFaloud site licence to Read and Write Gold version 10 for £1,350. Read and Write Gold can be installed or run direct from a USB stick.

ClaroRead

The latest version 5.7 of ClaroRead is much better at reading PDFs than previous versions, and it now does a good job of reading and highlighting the text in the PDF as it reads. Like Read and Write Gold, ClaroRead can read from anything including for example Microsoft Word and internet browsers. It also comes with good voices and tools such as word prediction, spellchecking and scanning. ClaroRead costs from £49 for a single user licence and various site licence options are available, e.g. £795 for up to 250 students, £1,050 for up to 1,000 students. ClaroRead can be installed or run direct from a USB stick.

Co:Writer 6

With the latest version of the Co:Writer word predictor you can select some text, click the >> button in the Co:Writer window and choose Speak to have it read out. The text is not highlighted as it is read. Co:Writer costs £39 per licence for Scottish schools, from Education Scotland.

Penfriend XL

The Penfriend word predictor can read text from a PDF. You select the text, copy it, and then Penfriend will read and highlight it in a separate window. Penfriend costs £24.99 per user for Scottish schools from Education Scotland. When you copy the text from the PDF, it adds a paragraph mark after each line, which means that the voice hesitates when it comes to the end of the line. This can be off-putting compared to PDFaloud and ClaroRead, which don't generally hesitate at the end of each line. Penfriend can be installed or run direct from a USB stick.

Free text readers: Natural Reader, IVONA Minireader and Balabolka

There are many free text readers available and we like Natural Reader, Ivona Minireader and Balabolka because they are straightforward and easy to use and work with the Scottish voices. With Natural Reader and Ivona, you select the text you want to read and then click the 'Play' button or press a hotkey. The text then gets read out, but it is not highlighted in the PDF as it reads. Like Penfriend, these programs generally hesitate at the end of each line of the PDF because they think there is a paragraph mark.

Alternatively, you can copy the text to the clipboard and then Natural Reader and Balabolka can read it out, and highlight it, in a separate window. This takes up space on the screen and is not as good as having it read and highlighted in the document itself. There is a 'portable' version of Balabolka which runs from a USB stick. Balabolka is also part of the AccessApps and MyStudyBar suites.

Adobe have just released new versions of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro. Adobe Reader is the free program that most people use for reading PDF files, such as the Hodder Gibson textbooks that we distribute for pupils who cannot read the paper versions, or the SQA digital exam papers. Acrobat Pro is what we use for creating and editing PDF files.

We will examine the new versions and update our information and web sites in the near future, but for now here are a few important comments.

Adobe Reader X

You can download the new Reader X free from Adobe's web site. It is similar to version 9, except that most of the tools now appear to the right of the screen rather than as toolbars along the top. This makes it looks tidier and less confusing because there aren't loads of mysterious buttons littering your screen, but old pros like us get slightly irritated because it takes more clicks to find things.

The goods news is that PDFaloud and other text-to-speech programs still work with Reader X. You may have to re-install PDFaloud, or manually copy it from the old Reader 9 to the new Reader X folder. (See our FAQs on how to do this.) 

Another good development is that you can add highlights and sticky notes to any PDF (not just ones which have been 'reader-enabled') which can be useful for pupils who are studying with PDF textbooks, or for staff who want to set and mark homework using PDF.

We'll review the new version in more detail soon - watch this space.

Adobe Acrobat Pro X

The new Acrobat Pro X has lots of new and refined features, but there are two in particular which make it really useful for those of us who want to make digital learning resources.

New editable, correctable scanning and OCR

With Acrobat Pro 9 you could scan paper resources into PDF and convert into readable text, but you couldn't correct any scanning mistakes. With Pro X, you can! This means that schools can, for example, scan paper prelims to PDF and correct any misrecognised words so that the questions can be spoken out correctly using text-to-speech software. With Pro 9, you would have had to buy another program like FineReader to do your corrections. We have tested the scanning and OCR with Pro X and it's pretty straightforward and easy to use.

Save to Word or text

Another major improvement is the formatting when saving from Acrobat Pro into other formats such as Microsoft Word - Pro X seems to do a much better job of giving you a Word file that looks like the original PDF. Saving to plain text also seems to give more accurate and reliable results.

Taken together, both these features now make Acrobat Pro X a very useful tool for anyone who wants to create accessible resources and Books for All: you can scan paper resources to PDF, check and correct any errors in order to produce a PDF digital version of the book that looks exactly like the original; and you can also save to Word or plain text and then edit it for example to produce a large print version of the book.

Adobe Acrobat Pro X is now available to Scottish schools from Learning and Teaching Scotland for approximately £51 per licence, plus £20 for the program DVD. You can download a 30 day trial version free from Adobe.

We have added a new section to the CALL Digital Exam Papers web site, with information on how to use the SQA digital exam papers. There's also a new page where you can download user guides and information sheets on using and making interactive resources in PDF.

Both Perfect Papers and P&N Publications are now supplying digital prelims with answer boxes - the same format and style that is used for the SQA digital question papers. This should make it much easier for schools who use these commercial prelim papers to provide them for students who need adapted digital prelims.

Perfect Papers say:

"Adapted: If you order the adapted version of our papers you will receive the Microsoft Word version, Standard Adobe PDF AND the specially adapted Adobe PDF file for candidates with disabilities and/or additional support needs.  If the paper is a "write on" format this will include boxes for candidate responses to be typed or, for papers which are not "write on" this will be a large format master (A3) for large print. For modern language subjects MP3 files of the listening audio are also included.”

P&N say:

“Q: Are P&N papers available as Digital Question Papers to support candidates with additional support needs?

A: All 2010/2011 test papers are available as "ready to go" Digital Question Papers (rights-enabled PDFs with form fields included) to support candidates with additional support needs. Please order your papers in the usual way, but include this request along with a centre-based (school/college) email address and contact name. You will be able to order these directly via our new and improved website which will be launched shortly.”

A report on the use of digital papers in 2010 is now available for download. The report contains a lot of interesting (well, to me, anyway) statistics and feedback from staff who used the papers last year.

In 2010, 101 centres made 2000 requests for digital papers on behalf of 675 candidates. Compared with 2009, this represents a 71% increase in the number of requests, a 38% increase in the number of centres, and a 60% increase in the number of candidates. This continues the upward trend since the papers were first trialled in 2006. 

While more schools and candidates used the papers for the first time in 2010, the data also shows that most centres which used the papers in previous years made more requests for more candidates. Once a school 'goes digital', it seems the number of candidates increases each year, and the number of digital papers that a pupil uses also increases. This is good news because it shows that the papers are in most cases well received and meeting the needs of pupils.

Centres from 30 of the 32 local authorities requested digital papers, together with 5 colleges and 5 independent schools.

Candidates with dyslexia and specific learning difficulties were the largest group of users (60%) of digital papers, although pupils with a wide range of other difficulties also used them.

Each year SQA send a questiuonnaire to staff who used the papers and Maggie Quinn of SQA has compiled some useful observations which will help SQA and CALL to develop and support use of digital papers.

The report also summarises feedback from a Focus Group meeting held on 29th October 2010, which will also help improve quality of the papers and administration.

The Digital Papers project has been a great success: a really good collaboration between SQA, CALL, schools and pupils. One of the key players has been Sheila Rennie, SQA Manager of Assessment Materials and Publications. Sheila, along with her colleagues Patricia McDonald and Maggie Quinn, has really driven the project along and the uptake of papers is a tribute to her hard work and professionalism. Sheila retired last year and we wish her well.

SQA have made all the 2010 adapted digital papers available on the SQA web site. There are over 400 papers covering a wide range of subjects.

These past papers are ideal for revision and practice, for pupils who are going to be sitting prelims with digital papers, or are intending to 'go digital' in the 2011 exams. Subject teachers also find the past papers useful for class teaching: the papers can be shown on an interactve white board and answers typed on-screen. 

You can also download digital versions of answer booklets, for use with papers that are not "question-and-answer" format (i.e. most Standard Grade Credit, and Higher and Advanced Higher papers).

SQA have put up the 2009 adapted digital past papers on their web site for anyone to download. They cover all levels from Intermediate through to Advance Higher with a wide range of different subjects. This means you can now download papers from 2007, 2008 and 2009 for revision and practice.

In response to comments from centres, SQA have added 'tick boxes' to Part 1 of the Standard Grade Chemistry paper. Previously, you had to use the Comment/markup tools to draw a circle or mark the answer from the multiple choice, but now you just click with the mouse, which should be faster and simpler.

In 2009 there were 1,167 requests for Adaped Digital Question Papers from 73 centres on behalf of 422 candidates. To find out more about digital papers visit  CALL's dedicated web site http://www.adapteddigitalexams.org.uk/Home/, SQA's Assessment Arrangements site, or come on a CALL Scotland training course.