Listening to your Text
By Louis Loeffler
Assistant Professor and Department Chair of Instructional Technology - Cardinal Stritch University
I do a bit of driving as well as other activities where an mp3
player comes in handy. While driving I will listen to a variety
of podcasts or my favorite music. Recently I decided it would also be a
good use of my time to have some of the articles that I am asked to
read for a class I am taking at UWMadison available in audio form - so
in this way I replace reading with listening.
It turns
out this is done rather simply by software - there are a variety of
Text to MP3 software programs available. I choose (since I am using a
Macintosh) TextToMp3 (http://www.sveinbjorn.org/texttomp3)
According to the web site, "
TextToMP3
is a simple droplet program which accepts dropped text files and
converts them into speech in MP3 format using Apple's Speech Manager 
technology and the open-source LAME MP3 encoder."
This means that you simply need to have a text file, drag and drop it
on the program, and it generates an MP3 file for you. It works
for any file with ".txt" as the extension.
Creating the txt file is fairly simple. Most word processors have a
Save as feature which allows you to save the document you are working with/viewing as a text file - eliminating the formatting (
italics,
bold, font size, etc). Once saved I could create the mp3, move it onto my mp3 player and voila!
I
ran into a problem though, my document that was assigned was a pdf - I
needed a simple way to convert pdf files to txt files. I did some
searching and while software and/or translation websites existed, they
either had a price associated with them or gave me unsatisfactory
results.
I
then turned to a feature available in Gmail. If you have ever
received
a document as an attachment in GMail you know that one of the features
is to view the attachment as HTML. This includes pdf documents. So I
emailed the pdf document to myself, and when I received it I was able
to view as HTML!
Once it was in HTML format I was able to highlight the text, copy it,
and paste it in a simple word processor which would allow me to save
the file as txt. Once it was txt I ran TextToMP3 and I had the audio
file - getting my reading done has become easier - by having the
document read to me.
So the steps in this process are:
- Email (using Gmail) yourself the pdf attachment (if the document is in PDF form)
- View the attachment as HTML
- Highlight the words in the HTML document - then copy
- Paste into a word processor
- Save as Text file (.txt)
- Convert using a Text to MP3 piece of software
I
see uses for this as we work towards differentiating or assisting
students with reading difficulties. Easily and quickly you can
take a reading assignment and convert it to a format where students may
hear what they are reading.
Resources:
MacWebAdditionally you might want to try this web resource with your text file.
For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long