Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Slides Show by a guy with cerebral palsy.

It was more than 2 years ago that I first implemented a speech aid with slides. As you know, I have cerebral palsy and speech impediment. So it's very hard to speak to people who have not talked with me in person. And many friends have hard time to have conversation with me even after years.

So even if I have some good ideas in my head, it's sometimes hard to pass them to other people, or more specifically, giving a presentation by myself would be nearly impossible.

However, there has been one helpful software, Text-to-Speech software, which blind people usually use as screen reader. Then I wrote a command which sends a text line to TTS driver and lets it speak. It was ok, but it was not successful especially when I gave a short lecture of the commands, how I had created it, in London Dec. 2007. It was big embarrassing, and I had temper to throw myself into River Themes after the failed speech, but I did allow myself not to commit it. :-)

2 years later, it was last December, actually; I had another idea doing the same thing. If I have slides images (jpeg) and audio (wav) files of narration which are generated through TTS, then I can make a movie file from them. I used Microsoft Movie Maker for it. Here is a first test movie:


And I had to give a presentation for my MBA class in last December, so that I used this method to create one for myself, which is following: