Moodle Users: Combine ReadSpeaker And Brickfield For Educational Accessibility

Achieving a high level of accessibility within your courses is an important pursuit, but it can be tricky if you’re not sure which assistive technology (AT) platforms to choose. There are a plethora of options available, and frequently it’s best to opt for a combination of solutions rather than just one.

Below, we’ll compare two leading AT platforms: Brickfield Education Labs’ Accessibility Toolkit and ReadSpeaker. Ultimately, we recommend using both together for best results—but first you’ll want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Be sure to check out our comprehensive list of assistive technology tools for more information on how they work together in an educational context.

Brickfield And ReadSpeaker: A Great Combination To Make Your Course Content Accessible

What is the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit?

The Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit has a packaged accessibility checker that improves the accessibility of educational content housed within the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS).

For educators, the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit:

• Analyzes course content for accessibility issues
• Provides reports on the issues found
• Offers a bulk course update feature to correct common problems; users can quickly make simple fixes like address broken links, add image descriptions, and more

 

Gavin Henrick, founder of Brickfield, emphasizes the “find and fix” method for making course content accessible: “We want educators to be empowered to find and fix accessibility concerns before their courses go live—or even after they’ve been published—so students of all abilities can interact meaningfully with the content.”

Brickfield also provides unlimited accessibility courses to teach educators how to improve accessibility as they create lessons in the future.

For students, Brickfield offers file conversions into formats like ePub, Electronic Braille, and audio, as well as an introduction to digital skills training.

What is ReadSpeaker?

ReadSpeaker is a flexible TTS platform that improves the accessibility of educational content presented on any platform.

For educators, ReadSpeaker is a simple way to deliver a robust, accessible learning experience for every student.

For students, ReadSpeaker:

• Provides high-quality audio and translations of online content
• A full suite of reading, writing, and studying tools to support diverse learners, including the ability to:
  • Adjust the way text appears on their screens to improve readability
  • Adjust content displays using page masks
  • Highlight text for more effective studying
  • Customize the programmable dictionary and pronunciation library

ReadSpeaker is an excellent choice for learners who like to hear text spoken aloud, as well as neurodivergent students, new language learners, visually impaired users, and people who have trouble with visual processing.

Unlike the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit, ReadSpeaker isn’t limited to one LMS.

The platform can be used seamlessly within every major LMS, browser, operating system, and offline document program. In fact, users can even use ReadSpeaker’s TTS features to work from their phones or tablets.

Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit

ReadSpeaker TTS

✓ Analyzes the accessibility of Moodle course html content ✓ Generates accessibility reports for Moodle content for courses, programs, and across the institution ✓ Allows bulk fixing of errors and missing accessibility features, including headlines, alt text, and web links ✓ Platform and interface available in a growing range of languages: English, Polish, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan and Italian ✓ Offers students alternative file formats for content, such as ePub, audio, and Electronic Braille ✓ Gives educators free resources for learning about making accessible content

✓ Gives students a highly customizable audio learning experience with natural sounding text-to-speech ✓ Works within all LMSs, web content, cloud-based education programs, proctoring software, and most document formats, including .docx; .html; .pdf; .xlsx; .pptx; .txt ✓ Designed for every type of learner ✓ Helps fill in the gaps left behind by automated accessibility checkers ✓ Translates content into 50+ languages ✓ In addition to TTS, it also offers students helpful learning and study tools like highlighting, page masking, and an editable dictionary

Both platforms support accessibility in different ways.

Whereas the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit offers a broad scope of assistive tech tools for use specifically within Moodle, ReadSpeaker specializes in bringing you the latest and best in text-to-speech technology for use everywhere.

If you use the Moodle LMS and you’d like a suite of tools that can help you achieve high levels of accessibility within your academic content, the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit is a great choice. The Accessibility Toolkit will help your educators present content more effectively to students, whatever their learning requirements.

Sometimes, however, students will be working outside the Moodle environment. They may interact with content in Google Drive, One Drive, or on external websites. In those cases, you’ll need ReadSpeaker to bring that text to life.

If you believe your students—of all abilities and learning needs—would benefit the most from an intuitive and immersive TTS learning experience, ReadSpeaker is a must-have! ReadSpeaker will allow you to speech-enable any content you create, inside or outside of an LMS.

With ReadSpeaker, your students will also have access to a range of helpful study tools—a dictionary, translation tool, page masks, and more—that can help make content easier to understand and process visually.

Can you use both ReadSpeaker and the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit?

Yes, you can!

In fact, that’s exactly what we recommend.

⇨ The Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit allows you to find and fix accessibility issues in your Moodle courses, and future-proof your content offerings through accessibility training and skills development.

⇨ Meanwhile, ReadSpeaker allows students to work wherever they please, and with whatever browsers, operating systems, LMSs, or other environments they prefer.

Using both Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit and ReadSpeaker ensures all your bases are covered.

You could use the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit to address accessibility issues within your Moodle courses but provide ReadSpeaker for students whenever they work outside the LMS on external websites, within offline documents, or on their mobile devices.

Teachers can also use Brickfield’s accessibility checker to improve the accessibility of their Moodle Quiz questions, for example, which benefits students who use ReadSpeaker to listen to content.

Even with the best of intentions, some issues will slip through the cracks if educators don’t have the awareness or skill set to identify and fix problems. This is where the accessibility training courses from the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit can be a lifesaver.

Once your content is optimized for accessibility, ReadSpeaker’s TTS capabilities breathe life into the text and let students work with a robust set of study tools and options.

In other words: The more accessible educators can make their content with Brickfield’s Accessibility Toolkit, the better experience students will have listening to that content with ReadSpeaker’s TTS platform.

Interested in learning more about assistive tech? Contact ReadSpeaker here!