(Screenshot of my WAVE accessibility report)

(This is the infographic that I made with my group members for EDCI 339, I am not sure if any of my 339 group members take EDCI 337 too, if so, we might use the same infographic)

Q&A 1

Have you used Text to Speech tools before? Did you find it useful? Did you try out some of the different voices? What impact did the different voices have on your ability to absorb information?

I haven’t tried Text to Speech tools in my past work, but I just tried Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech. This tool can help you convert text into speech so that you can get information without reading it, or convert text into speech so that it can be used for other purposes, such as making speech reading applications or creating speech AIDS (Stevens, 2003). I think the overall experience is very good, and it is a very good tool for me to convert words into voice accurately and play them out. Even when I run or drive again, I can listen to this text-to-speech to learn some new knowledge.

When trying TTS again, there are many options, such as male, male (young people), male (news broadcast), female (young people), documentary style and so on. Different styles are basically in line with my concepts and ideas about the voices of these people. For example, the tone of the news broadcast style is very orthodox, just like the newscaster is broadcasting something to me. And the voice of women (children) will be very lovely, just like a lovely child reading her extracurricular books to me again. But on the whole, I think the voice of TTS tools on the market still has some mechanical feeling, there is no change in tone, and some sentences even have the problem of sentence-breaking errors (Kumari, 2015). Different voices will also affect my efficiency in absorbing information. For example, the voice style of young women makes me better absorb information, because the voice style of young women gives me a feeling of eloquence and helps me better remember the content of the broadcast. But I think the effect of broadcasting varies from person to person. Maybe some learners prefer other styles of broadcasting, it really depends.

2

Which design principles did you use to create your infographic in Canva? Which elements of a ‘good infographic’ were you able to incorporate? What other principles did you consider? What does the template make easier and what does it make harder when creating your infographic?

When I create infographics, my main goal is to convey the clearest and most accurate information in an illustrated way and the simplest mode. Therefore, I used the principle of Hierarchy, and distributed the subtitle and text content in layers, among which the subtitle was more conspicuous, so I could see the subtitle and choose which part to read.

In addition, I also use the principle of alignment to typeset information and images. In an image, all the information at the same level is the same, which let readers to see the information at different levels at first sight and know which information is the same and which information is at different levels. This principle is helpful to the beautiful design of appearance and can also improve the readability of information. In order to improve the participation of images, I also added many small pictures to the infographic to improve the visual appeal.

I think the template provided by Canva can help me to reduce many difficulties in typesetting, but there are also some inconveniences. For example, if I want to change the style of the whole infographic, I need to do a lot of operations, and the freedom of my own design is relatively low, so I can only make simple changes according to the style of the template.

3

Graphic design is inherently visual – what additions or modifications could you make to ensure that learners with visual impairments have access to the same information in an infographic in an online setting?

For some readers with visual defects, I will optimize and improve the infographic from the following aspects.

Use clearly text: Many visually impaired people find it difficult to read smaller fonts, so they can choose a clearer font and choose a font color with higher contrast with the background to ensure that they can read normally.

Simple layout: It can make visually impaired people know the distribution of information more clearly, so as to grasp the main information and understand the main content of the information map.

TTS: Some visually impaired people can’t read the text normally. You can add some TTS tools to the web page to convert the text into audio and transmit information to the readers by audio.

Color selection: Some visually impaired people may be red and green color blind, so you can set color selection cards on the web page, allowing them to choose their favorite color cards to avoid information dissemination errors.

Reference:

Stevens, C. , Lees, N. , & Vonwiller, J. . (2003). Experimental Tools to Evaluate Intelligibility of Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesis: Effects of Voice Gender and Signal Quality. 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, EUROSPEECH 2003 – INTERSPEECH 2003, Geneva, Switzerland, September 1-4, 2003. DBLP.

Kumari, R. S. S. , & Sangeetha, R. . (2015). Conversion of English Text-to-Speech (TTS) Using Indian Speech Signal. (Vol.4).

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/visual-hierarchy