engleski

To Record the Speech or to Synthesise?

The right to education and ICT cooperatively opened the way to education for groups that were limited to only small number of professions. The right to education is guaranteed to everyone, through the international human rights system that has come from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that, at the end of two World Wars, the international community has opted for work on a better and more humane future. Realizing this right gives everyone the chance to develop their opportunities and to acquire intellectual, spiritual and social autonomy by acquiring knowledge, skills, values and attitudes. In addition, receiving the education and trainingof good qualityare also prerequisites for the enjoyment of many other human rights such as the right to work and the right to informed participation in political and social life. In order to realize and consume the right, people with special needs, especially blind and visually impaired, need the ability to adjust the process for the realization of rights. In this context, the right to education also requires adaptability of the whole process. Adaptability refers to the state's obligation to adapt education to different groups of children and young people, such as minority members, children with special needs, refugee children, etc. Adaptability implies that education and training are flexible and can be adapted to the different needs of different learners, not that pupils have to adapt to school, which unfortunately is a common practice. To secure the right to education for blind and visually impaired people, the Department of Information Science of the Faculty of Philosophy in Mostar, together with the Faculty Library, has launched a project to prepare teaching materials for blind and visually impaired people. The question is how to prepare the teaching material and literature needed for blind and visually impaired people and which method to choose for adaptation of teaching materials. Through the pilot project we tried to find out what is happening with the information that the listener receives by signalled through the audio channel and whether the information is better perceived when the signal is human speech rather than artificially created (computer generated) sound. Methodology: audio recordings of the teaching units has been made from several course topics, after which the recordings are prepared for playback. That was the first test set. The second test set was a textual teaching material prepared for sound reproduction on a computer using computer speech synthesis software. There was no overlap between the test sets. The amount of perceived information was tested for both sets of tests and a comparison of results was made. The purpose of the research was to find the optimal solution for adapting teaching materials to blind and visually impaired, to provide them with the same opportunities that other students have. Results suggest that human speech is still preferredover computer generated speech and enables faster comprehension.

human speech ; computer generated speech ; learning materials

nije evidentirano