[Athen] JAWS, Braille and the Phonetic Alphabet

[Nind, Rich M]

Hi all,

We've got a student who's suddenly transferred from an English/Ed studies course to English. This involves a language module which involves reading and writing the phonetic alphabet.

The student is a proficient JAWS reader and Braille user. From my initial scans of the internet it seems that JAWS can't read the phonetic alphabet directly, but can with some trickery, decode a set of symbols representing a word into a word broken into syllables. This doesn't seem to be particularly useful though, and may actually be counterproductive in any kind of assessment. There is a Braille notation for the International Phonetic Alphabet though, which hopefully we'll be able to produce with our equipment (we've got a Viewplus with Tiger software). There is the further complication of the student learning the new Braille notation too.


Does anybody have experience of working through a similar module with a student?, or of brailling this type of material?. Also are there any good resources for a braille user to learn this code?. Any experiences or advice on or off list will be most welcome.

Many thanks
Rich

Rich Nind
Technical Advisor
Inclusive Practice Team
Disabled Student Support Portfolio
Student and Learning Services
Sheffield Hallam University
Tel: (+44) 0114 2255311
Email: r.m.nind at shu.ac.uk