Adding captions to your messages

For each page, you can type in text that will be displayed when the exported mp3 file is played. For example, the screen shot here shows a personal workbook page playing in Windows Media Playe, along with a subtitle added by the user.

Why add captions?

• If the user's speech is hard to understand, seeing the text of the utterance may help the listener to understand it better. Just typing in a word or phrase may provide enough context to increase intelligibility.
  
• Seeing written text may also help the user to remember what is played in each mp3.
• If the user is trying to memorize sentences or phrases, as in a workbook used for language therapy orfor script training, it may be helpful for the user to see the text of the target sentence displayed.
• Captions may be especially appropriate if you are creating a digital scrapbook,since  it can give each picture a text title.
• Finally, captions may help with sentence planning. In this case, they would be added BEFORE the user creates speech. A person with good reading and writing abilities but with severe apraxia or another speech output problem may want to type out the target sentence first, and then take as much time as needed to record the text word by word. SentenceShaper can help such a person to create more intelligible speech, and the captions will help users to understand the speech even more easily. In other cases, a caregiver could type out a few salient words or phrases to summarize the main points.

How to create captions

You can create one caption per page. So if you are exporting each bean as a separate mp3 file, then each mp3 file will have the same caption (the caption for that page).

In the Export Settings Screen, check the box in the section "Decide whether to add text captions". You will now see a text box (the "Caption Box") on the Main Screen whenever you open a workbook. Note: you can drag it to another part of the screen, or make it larger. In the screenshot here of a workbook page, the Caption Box is outlined in TURQUOISE.

Your text will be saved when you exit the page, so you can change the text at a later time and then export the page again (just as you can re-record the sound files and re-export the page).

Note: If the Caption Box is displayed, it will slightly complicate your use of the space bar to turn the sound recorder on and off...when you first open a page, or after you have typed text into the Caption Box, the space bar won't respond unless you first click some part of the screen outside of the Caption Box.

Captions for non-Western writing systems

At this time, unfortunately, SentenceShaper cannot create captions for languages that do not use the standard English set of characters (for example, those used in Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi). However, there are two ways that you can add captions.

First, You can add captions directly to any pictures you plan to import into SentenceShaper. Just open them in the Windows Accessory Paint, and add text. (Do a Google search on "How to use microsoft paint" and you will find many links to short tutorials about this very useful progran that comes free with Windows.)

A second way to add non-western captions is to make your exported workbook into a movie. Windows Movie Maker (another free program that comes with Windows) lets you add captions in any writing system. See the section on making movies with exported SentenceShaper utterances.