Open Files in Moodle with Readspeaker

Readspeaker is a text-to-speech tool built in to SCC's Moodle site. Readspeaker's main purpose is to offer text-to-speech on any text appearing on any page within Moodle. However, it can also be used to open many types of files posted in Moodle in its Docreader environment. This article describes some of the key features of Readspeaker's Docreader.

In a moodle classroom, any file that can be opened by Readspeaker will have the Docreader icon next to it.

link to Docreader from a document in a moodle course

Readspeaker's Docreader will open Microsoft Office documents (Excel, Word, PowerPoint), OpenOffice documents (.ODP, .ODS, .ODT) and other popular document formats (.PDF, .RTF, .EPUB).

After clicking the icon, the document will open online in Docreader in Layout Mode -- Layout Mode preserves the document's format and design.

The layout mode of a document presented in docreader

Clicking the tab to switch to Text Mode strips formatting from the document and leaves only the readable text.

A document in text only mode

The menu at the left allows you to navigate to individual pages in the documents. Clicking on arrows on the left and right side of the current page progress the document in sequence from page to page.

A document in layout mode showing the navigation between pages of the document and the toggle button that shows and hides the navigation

The Listen tab on the top menu reads the text on the document's current page using ReadSpeaker's text-to-speech tool, highlighting text as it is read

A document in Docreader with "Listen" mode engaged. An arrow points out that the text is being highlighted as it is read aloud.

Clicking More Tools on the top menu provides access to more text reading tools as well as the Save button to download the current document to the user's computer.

The menu bar within Docreader. Arrows point to the "Save" icon and the "More Tools" menu.

Docreader works great on Chromebooks and on Mobile devices!