How ReadSpeaker TTS Works With Anthology Ally (Formerly Blackboard Ally)

In the 2022-2023 school year, 15% of U.S. students between the ages of 3 and 21 received special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. That’s 7.5 million learners, each of whom brings a unique set of abilities, needs, and preferences to class.

These numbers mean that no single piece of assistive technology (AT) can make your online course accessible to everyone.

An accessible learning environment meets diverse individual needs—and the only way to do that is to offer lots of different tools and resources.

A closet full of AT doesn’t make an effective accommodations program, however. You also need to understand how the various pieces of the AT puzzle fit together. For example, look at Anthology Ally (formerly Blackboard Ally) and ReadSpeaker’s text-to-speech (TTS) tools, each of which serves a unique role in making learning management systems (LMSs) more accessible.

Here are a few ways these complementary AT tools work together to remove barriers for online learners.

Where Anthology Ally stops, ReadSpeaker starts. Download our free guide to see how these accessibility tools work together in your LMS.

Creating a More Accessible LMS With Anthology Ally and ReadSpeaker

Anthology Ally is for course content creators.

It’s essentially an automated accessibility checker with content formatting tools attached.

The primary function of Ally is to identify potential accessibility issues so you can fix them before you publish. It also translates course content into a handful of alternative formats—from your standard LMS text to a PDF tagged for AT, electronic braille, or a Microsoft Immersive Reader file, for example.

Ally does offer rudimentary text-to-speech technology, but it requires users to download an audio file and lacks user controls.

ReadSpeaker picks up where Anthology Ally leaves off by serving the user directly.

ReadSpeaker’s LMS integrations provide another alternative format—audible speech derived from digital text—along with a set of accessible reading/writing tools.

Crucially, ReadSpeaker makes TTS and accessibility tools available within the LMS, through a simple user interface, and without downloads required (although downloadable speech files are certainly available).

ReadSpeaker text-to-speech solutions are for students. They allow every learner to control their own experience of the material: reading, listening, or both at once with simultaneous TTS and text highlighting.

Let’s break down the capabilities of these two digital-accessibility tools:

Use Anthology Ally to:

• Create more accessible learning content. The accessibility checker identifies common errors like poor color contrast, missing alternative text for images, and misuse of semantic HTML. Note that this is for instructional content only; Ally does not check student-generated content for accessibility issues.
• Give students access to multiple text formats. One learner may prefer Microsoft Immersive Reader. Another may like BeeLine Reader. Ally makes these alternative print formats available to every user.
• Address some accessibility issues within a limited range of LMS’s. As we publish, Ally integrates into six learning management systems: Blackboard Learn, Canvas, Self-Hosted Moodle, Open LMS, D2L BrightSpace, and Schoology.

Use the ReadSpeaker Suite of Learning Tools to:

• Create a high-quality TTS option for all LMS content. ReadSpeaker places a user-controlled listen button in the student-facing LMS interface. That allows users to speech-enable any text that appears in the LMS—including student-generated content. It also lets students choose their favorite natural-sounding voice, and control over pitch and reading speed.
• Give students a broader accessibility toolkit. In addition to TTS in more than 50 languages and 200 lifelike voices, the ReadSpeaker text-to-speech user interface offers more than 15 learning tools. Students can use ReadSpeaker in the LMS to enlarge text; engage text-only mode; use a page mask or reading ruler; read text within images using OCR; listen and read along with simultaneous highlighting; and more.
• Introduce TTS and associated tools to any major learning platform. ReadSpeaker offers LMS-native TTS integrations for all learning and assessments platforms. That includes all six of the LMS’s that Anthology Ally supports, plus itsLearning, SoftChalk, Learnosity, Open edX, Proctorio, Respondus, and many more.

Digital accessibility requires a full-spectrum approach. You must remove barriers for students with disabilities, of course. But you also need tools for English-language learners; busy students who need to study while doing chores; and people who simply learn better by listening than by reading.

Anthology Ally can help make your LMS content work better with a student’s existing AT, such as a screen reader. ReadSpeaker’s Suite of Learning Tools offers a new AT option for all learners, with and without disabilities.

Text to speech within your LMS supports the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, which advocates multiple means of presentation for all educational content. This approach removes barriers for students with disabilities, but it can also improve learning outcomes for all students. After all, everyone learns differently, and many learners benefit from lifelike, user-friendly TTS from ReadSpeaker.