What’s the price for this great new tool?  Only $29.95

Other anticipated future product releases and improvements.  

We are planning to send you product updates for your current Accessibility Suite by April.  There will be NO charge for those updates under the current grant, BUT, we MUST have your signed Grant Acceptance Letter by January 15 in order for you to be eligible to receive these updates.

You can see that Premier Assistive is fully committed to development of new / enhanced technologies that will benefit the education arena.  In addition to the 2 new products outlined above, over the next 6-9 months Premier is also targeting significant improvements in: (1) color OCR (optical character recognition) scanning technologies, (2) Internet / email productivity tools, (3) digital speech applications (including translation) for our products.  We will keep you abreast of these evolving developments in the coming months. 

Budgeting for the Next School Year

It hardly seems like the school year has started and we already find ourselves halfway through the year.  For those of you who have budgeting responsibilities, that time of year is rapidly approaching when budgets must start being prepared for the next school year.  Whether you have authority for final overall budget approval or just input to the budgeting process, we know very soon you must start thinking about how much to request for next year and, of course, how you intend to justify or substantiate those planned expenses.

Certainly, one of our primary objectives with the Grant program was to give all recipient organizations relief from the hassle of trying to get budget approval this year BEFORE you could even use our software and we achieved that goal!! 

Secondly, with the unlimited “enterprise / organization level licensing”, we have allowed grant recipients to install our products on EVERY eligible PC workstation in their direct jurisdiction, thereby, maximizing the number of individuals who could reap the benefits of these technologies.  As many of you already well know, similar widespread licensing of products from other vendors would simply have not been affordable, given the associated prices for any such widespread distribution of other comparable software.   As a result of our Grant program, you will NEVER have to pay original licensing fees for the products in the Accessibility Suite at any time in the future!

Part of your budget consideration for next year will be to determine whether or not to sign up for what we’ve called the “maintenance agreement” as outlined in your Grant letter.  What do you get for this nominal cost? For the next school year, you will receive

1)      Ongoing free technical support via email.

2)      Limited free phone support.

3)      Free upgrades to all products that we already include in the Accessibility Suite and free receipt of all new products that we ADD to the Accessibility Suite during the year (see “New Products” section above for examples).

To help you in your budgeting process, we’d like to offer the following suggestions and thoughts to help make the planning and justification process a little easier:

1)      How much with the maintenance agreement cost us?  The planned maintenance costs were outlined in your Grant letter. We are committed to provide you with the support and upgrades described above for the fee we quoted you in your Grant letter.

2)      How do I justify these costs?  When you review your proposed Premier Assistive maintenance fee that covers ALL workstations / users, compare that to the price you would need to pay for even single-user licenses for competitive products.  You will immediately see that, for the next school year, ALL of your users under your jurisdiction can be served with ALL Premier products (in your Accessibility Suite) for the single maintenance fee.  Conversely, for that same amount, you can probably only serve a handful of users with single copies of other selected products OR, said another way, to serve an equivalent number of users with other software packages would be significantly more expensive and cost prohibitive …….a very compelling argument for budget discussions.

3)      Will there be any other costs from Premier? The only costs that might be incremental to the standard maintenance agreement could be brand new products developed by Premier that you may want that are NOT included in the standard Accessibility Suite (see “New Products” section above for examples).  As always, you should anticipate that even prices for new products that Premier produces will still be kept in line with our overall pricing philosophy of ensuring that Assistive Technology is affordable for everyone, both in institutions and for personal /home individual use.

4)      Are we required to pay the maintenance agreement?  No.  As pointed out in your Grant letter, there is no obligation for you to pay the maintenance fee and you can continue to use the products you have in their current versions.  However, if you elect to not pay the fee, you will not be entitled to technical support, product upgrades, special promotional offers, etc. beyond the end of the 2002-2003 school year.

We hope these suggestions will make your budgeting process a little easier.  As you prepare your budgets, if you have any further questions on this topic, please don’t hesitate to call us at 815-722-5961 or 517-668-8188.

Product Showcase – TEXT TO AUDIO

Text-To-Audio is another of Premier = Assistive’s leading products.  It is an easy-to-use tool that converts electronic documents to audio files.  AT&T’s Natural Voices™ are also available with Text-to-Audio to provide the highest fidelity digital speech audio.  Text-To-Audio can even be used to turn E-books to “audio books”.  With Text-to-Audio, you are no longer tied to you PC once you create the audio files.  The convenience of = Text-to-Audio means that you can now fit reading back into your schedule, by turning that reading into portable compact audio files that you can listen to while doing other activities like traveling or exercising.

Text-to-Audio has tremendous application for the classroom.  We are now seeing teachers scan entire lessons, chapters, etc. from text books (using a product like Premier’s Scan and Read Pro) and using Text-to-Audio to create audio files that they can in turn give to the students to augment their instruction.  Another particular benefit is for learners who require “para-professionals”, reading assistants, etc. to facilitate a person’s reading.  With portable audio files, these learners are now freed not only from the burden of always having to coordinate with reading assistant’s schedules, but also don’t even have to be tied to their PC’s anymore, because they can take audio files with them in MP3 players, using Walkmen for CD’s, etc.  Of course, this benefit is not limited to only “special needs” learners.  We have teachers who are also deploying this for traditional classrooms as well.  In fact, Premier Assistive is partnering with Digisette, Inc., a leading maker of MP3 players, to bundle our software for sale to the general buying public through retail consumer electronics stores worldwide.  This clearly demonstrates the growing acceptance of digital voice as a proven medium for delivery of information for both educational and recreational purposes.

Text-To-Audio is fast.  A 15 to 1 conversion time will allow you to quickly convert any documents into audio files.  Text-To-Audio allows you to select up to 20 documents to convert at one time. Each document can have it’s own setting and voice selection.  Text-To-Audio can use virtually any type of word processor file. It can read Microsoft Word, HTML, Rich Text and Standard ASCII file formats. Break an E-book up into chapters and then select a different voice for each chapter to give you some variation.  Readers can even preview or edit the document before the audio file is created.

Text-To-Audio creates very compact files. Audio files traditionally take up a lot of room on your PC’s hard drive, CD’s, etc.   Text-To-Audio can create audio files in 9 different formats, including MP3, Standard Wave, DSP, and GSM.  All audio file formats can still be played with Microsoft's standard Media Player on your PC.  Make these files portable by downloading them to an MP3 player or by burning them to an audio CD.

The “talking word processor” feature of Text-to-Audio can also well as a proofreading tool. When readers use the word processor to read a document, the word is highlighted as it is being spoken, making it easier for the reader to follow along.  The combination of both audio and visual delivery can significantly increase a reader’s comprehension! 

Text-to-Audio is the most powerful, yet affordable tool of its kind in the world today!

Reminder: Fund-raising Opportunities - New Internet Browser

As highlighted in our December Newsletter, virtually all education institutions already have one or more organizations that have needs to conduct fund-raising activities.  This would be an ideal chance to sell beneficial software products for school and home while raising money for other good causes for your organization.  We’ve established a fund-raising program that will be simple to launch and manage and will not require you to collect money or order information.  For more details and to receive fund-raising information, check out the CURFEW website at www.curfewbrowser.com or call us at 517-668-8188 or 815-722-5961.

Business Partnerships

With a new year in front of us, you should anticipate significant strides to be made in the arena of more effective management and administration of programs dealing with Individual Education Plans (IEP) and Individual Transition Plans (ITP).  Wizdom Education has outstanding application systems to truly get your Special Education program under control.  You really owe it to yourself to find out more about what the Wizdom Education systems can do for you.  We encourage you to contact Wizdom Education for more information on these state-of-art applications on their website at www.wizdomeducation.com or call them at 630-357-3000.

Technical Tips

TEXT-TO-AUDIO

Creation of large audio files using Text-to-Audio. 

Many users have asked about recommended file sizes when creating audio files using Text-to-Audio.  File size WILL vary depending on the quality of the audio you wish to produce.  While the file size is theoretically only limited by your PC’s resources, we suggest the following “Rules Of Thumb”:

(1)   “Default” quality audio will produce about 1 minute of audio for every 1,000 characters.  So a 10,000 character document will produce 10 minutes of audio and create a 5 MB audio file. 

(2)   Generally, for every minute of HIGH quality audio (WAVE format) it will require more space, about 500K bytes.  So a 10-minute audio file will take up about 5 MB (megabytes) of disk space.  Since you can store approximately 650 MB of data on a full CD, this means that for HIGH quality audio, on a single CD, you could conceivably store 1300 minutes (or 21+ hours of audio).

(3)   Many “media engines” (i.e. REAL PLAYER, MS MEDIA PLAYER, etc.) also have limits as to the size of the audio file that they can play.  Therefore, even if you could make a very large file, there is no guarantee that you would be able to listen to it on your chosen player (PC, CD player, etc.).

“Usability” is your MOST important consideration. 

Aside from media engine limitations, even if you did want to cram a large amount of audio into a huge single file, you need to consider how you would “manage / use” that much data in a single file.  It is MUCH EASIER to manage and organize your files as, let’s say, single units or chapters.  By doing so, you can:

=E8    name them individually

=E8    find them more easily

=E8    navigate through them more effectively (jump, fast forward, rewind, etc.)

=E8    more easily re-sequence or even skip units / chapters to fit your curriculum. 

For example, if you have 10 chapters in book, it is much better to have 10 separate audio files and save them into a single folder on a PC or burn them onto a single CD.  In that manner, the “audio book” is still grouped together, but structured in a way that makes it much easier to use.  Then, once you’ve created this “master” folder / CD for the book, you could simply make copies of the entire folder / CD to distribute to multiple students.  Remember, blank CD’s are only $0.30 each (or cheaper), so don’t make your life much more difficult by trying to save a few pennies.  Just a little upfront planning and organization will make you a powerful Text-to-Audio user!!

For more tips on best practices with Text-to-Audio, refer to the Frequently Asked Questions section of the Text-to-Audio manual that comes installed with the product.

QUICKSTART Guides 

Just a reminder again from last month, QUICKSTART Guides are now available for each of our products. These are meant to help get you up and running quickly with any of our products.

If you wish to receive any product updates or QUICKSTART Guides, please email your request to us at info@readingmadeeasy.com.

To review the latest product updates for any of Premier Assistive’s products, please visit our technical support web site at http://www.premier-programming.com/forms/techsupportform.html

We will send email to you with any requested product updates to which you are entitled.

 Unsolicited Testimonials and Success Stories From Some of Our Clients.

As you will see below, the successes and momentum continue to build!!! 

December 2002   “Thank you for all the work you put into the grant!  I love the programs!….I have scanned in most of the chapters of the Odyssey that we read in the 9^th grade that are not on the Lit book CD of selected reading materials.  My goal is to put together a CD containing both the scanned chapters and the chapters recorded on the CD so a student can listen from beginning to end without switching back and forth between the computer and the CD player.”

December 2002   “Each year I encounter 4 to 6 students who have serious difficulty meeting the reading and writing demand of college level work.  Last year I purchased your Scan & Read Pro software and found this to be very helpful.  I have also experimented with helping other students in my office and have found it to be very helpful to a number of our students as well.”

December 2002   “First, I’d like to thank you for awarding People Achieving Change Through Technology with one of your “Breaking Down Barriers to Assistive Technology” grants. I’m truly impressed with the programs I’ve tried so far. … At the moment, I am working with two consumers that I feel would benefit from your products.  One is an LD student and I will be recommending your Scan and Read Pro and Talking Word Processor…..The other consumer has a diagnosis of LD/ADHD and is having difficulty completing work tasks connected with his new job in a customer service / order processing department.  We’ve determined that he works best with auditory feedback.  Scan and Read Pro should help him read reports from his sales reps and supervisors…..”

December 2002   “I wanted to give you a quick update on what we are doing with the products you gave us with the grant.  The administration for our Regional high school asked me to load the Talking Word Processor, Screen Reader, Talking Calculator and Screen Magnifier in the English lab with the goal of making the computer accessible for all students.  They have asked me to come and give a 10-minute presentation to all Department Heads on Monday to share information about the products and to talk about universal design for learning.  They want me to come to Department meetings the following week to talk to the entire faculty department by department.  For interested teachers, we will setup training on how to use the programs to make curricula accessible for all students.

Also we have exciting things happening with the Text-to-Audio program.  The teachers in the middle school LLD program are creating CD’s of books and short stories and having students bring in their portable CD players and headphones to use in class.

We also have a group of high school honors students who have agreed to make curricular materials accessible by scanning documents teachers request for students in the high school (as part of) their technology project this semester.  So thank you!  Exciting things are happening here!”

Do you have a success story you’d like to share??? We’d love to publish your accomplishments for others to see.  Please email us with the details at info@readingmadeeasy.com. We’ll follow up with you by phone to clarify before we publish.  Thank you.