[Assessment_Advisory_Committee] Text-to-Speech on Tablets and Chromebooks

[HEIDE Jordan]

Dear Assessment Advisory Committee members,

ODE is requesting your feedback on whether to change its policy regarding allowing districts to use text-to-speech on tablets and Chromebooks.

Issue: For technical reasons, the pause feature is not available for text-to-speech (TTS) on tablets and Chromebooks. Students can stop TTS reading in the middle of an item or passage, but there is no way to have TTS resume reading where it was stopped. If the student activates TTS again for the same item or passages it will start again at the beginning. The pause feature, which allows TTS to resume reading where it was paused, is available on desktops and laptops.

Current Policy: ODE has disallowed the use of TTS on tablets and Chromebooks on the basis that the inability to pause TTS and then resume again at the place it was paused would disadvantage students testing on tablets and Chromebooks when they encountered a long passage or item.  It's important to note that while this restriction is noted in all documentation and user guides, AIR is not able to actually block TTS on tablets or Chromebooks. AIR and ODE received a lot of calls from districts that were testing students on tablets and Chromebooks and wanted to be able to use TTS. They questioned why it was not available and stated that it was a great inconvenience to not be able to use it.

Proposed Workaround: AIR has proposed some workarounds as an alternative to the pause feature if ODE decides to support TTS on tablets and Chromebooks in 2015-2016:

*         Students can select the text they want read aloud and TTS will read only the selected text. Therefore, if a student pauses a passage in the middle and wants the TTS to resume where the passage was paused, the student can highlight the remainder of the passage.

*         We can include in the documentation the recommendation that if a student will use TTS a desktop or laptop computer should be used for the ELA performance task test, which is the test that has the longest passages.

To inform ODE's decision-making on whether to allow TTS use on tablets and Chromebooks with the proposed workarounds, please respond with your feedback by Wednesday, September 30.

Thank you as always for your input!

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