ReadSpeaker and Brickfield Form New Partnership to Boost Moodle Accessibility

ReadSpeaker, a global leader in text-to-speech (TTS) technology, and Brickfield Education Labs (opens in a new tab), creators of the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit, are excited to announce a formal partnership. Building on years of collaboration to make Moodle courses more accessible, inclusive, and engaging, the two organisations are now joining forces in an official capacity.

The Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit, Enable is an assistive-technology solution built for Moodle. The Toolkit helps educators find and correct accessibility issues in course content (such as broken links, missing image descriptions, improper heading structures), provides bulk course update functions, offers extensive reporting, accessible text alternatives such as ePub, Braille and Tagged PDF, and supplies unlimited accessibility training to help institutions build accessible content.

ReadSpeaker offers high-quality text-to-speech with natural-sounding voices, and a suite of customisable learning tools that allow learners to listen to written content and work across different devices, documents, LMSs, and browsers. 

The partnership underpins the increasing importance of accessibility in learning environments; it is not just about compliance: it’s about enabling all learners to engage with, understand, and benefit from educational content.

The combination of Brickfield’s toolkit (which helps course creators identify and fix accessibility issues) with ReadSpeaker’s TTS (which provides a suite of speech-enhanced reading, writing and study tools and supports Universal Design for Learning) ensures a more complete, inclusive learning experience inside Moodle and wherever learning materials are used outside it.

By working together, educators can both improve the structural accessibility of courses and give learners choice in how they access content.

“At Brickfield, our mission has always been to enable educators to find and fix accessibility issues so that all students can meaningfully engage with course content, before and after courses go live and to enable students through accessible formats. This partnership brings together practical digital content accessibility, staff capacity building, with the ability to give students more choice in how they consume course material on the Moodle course page.”, Gavin Henrick (opens in a new tab), Founder, Brickfield Education Labs

Roy Lindemann (opens in a new tab), CMO, ReadSpeaker commented, “We’re proud to partner with Brickfield. By combining their powerful toolkit with our text-to-speech solution, we’re making Moodle courses more inclusive, not just structurally solid, but also usable and accessible for learners in a way that suits their needs. This is a big step towards truly equitable online education.”

What Users Can Expect

• Institutions and organisations using Moodle can deploy both solutions to ensure content is checked for accessibility issues and made audible through ReadSpeaker.
  
• Learners will have access to text read aloud, improved display tools, translations, and supportive study tools such as highlighting, dictionaries, translation and audio versions of any documents.
  
• Educators will benefit from the ability to correct or update large parts of courses in bulk, make content future-proof, receive training, and support inclusive design as content is being developed.

Read more about how ReadSpeaker and Brickfield work together /blog/how-readspeaker-works-with-brickfield/