CSIR
CSIR VOICE COMPUTING RESEARCH HELPS NON-READERS TO BECOME READERS
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onventional reading is currently accessible only to the traditionally literate person. Many school learners face barriers to reading, and consequently learning, due to early literacy difficulties, visual impairment, dyslexia and other special educational needs. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is helping to change this with the development of a user-friendly application (app) that adds and synchronises humannarrated or computer-generated audio to text. The audio can be added to text that is written in any of the 11 official languages of South Africa. “The app targets both the day-to-day content of educators and the textbooks of publishers. It adds value to the publishing industry by breaking down these barriers to turn non-readers into readers and increase the industry’s addressable market size”, says CSIR voice computing research group leader Karen Calteaux. The app is named iSinkwe, which is the
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Municipal Focus
isiZulu word for a bushbaby. The big eyes and ears of the bushbaby symbolise how iSinkwe empowers school learners to read through a rich audio-visual experience. The app allows users to create more accessible textbooks, class notes and other documents, opening up an exciting, interactive world of reading and learning to everyone. ISinkwe functions by adding audio, which is either recorded manually by a voice artist or generated automatically by a computer, to a standard Electronic Publication Version Three (EPUB3) document. It automates the synchronisation of the audio to the text of the document at word, sentence and paragraph levels, allowing users to switch between these levels when they read or navigate through the document using audio and highlighting. For clarification, iSinkwe does not translate the content from one language to another, but simply adds audio to documents that are already written in the language of the user’s choice.
“If users only have a Microsoft DOCX or PDF document, they can convert those documents automatically to the standard EPUB3 format using iSinkwe Convert. They simply upload the document to the iSinkwe website, and it will provide them with an EPUB3 version that they can download,” says product leader Georg Schlünz. ISinkwe Synchronise allows users to upload a standard EPUB3 document and, optionally, the pre-existing human-narrated audio files, to the iSinkwe website. When no humannarrated audio is available, computergenerated audio is added instead. It also allows for a combination of human-narrated and computergenerated audio. Users can then download the EPUB3 document with the synchronised text and audio included. To read any of the EPUB3 documents with synchronised text and audio, users need to install the iSinkwe Read app, which is currently available for Android, with iOS and Windows versions coming soon. Once the EPUB3 document is added to the library and
