Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000

It was detected that your browser does not have Javascript enabled. Without enabling Javascript, you may not be able to listen to the audio clip on this page without using a mouse to activate the controls. If you find yourself in this situation, please go to the Alternate "Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000" page. The alternate page will begin playing the audio automatically when you click on the link, but unfortunately you will not be able to control the audio (e.g., Rewind, Stop, Fast Forward).

Audio Controls for "Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000" Audio Clip:

If you do not already have it, you will need to download the QuickTime Player to hear the audio clip.

Transcript for "Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000" Audio Clip

Jean: Also, Doug what's your opinion about Kurzweil because we use it really widely, a lot more than we use JAWS at the campus that I came from and it reads the internet.
Doug: OK, what's my opinion about Kurzweil? I didn't catch the rest about JAWS.
Penny: They use it more often
Jean: We use it more widely than we use JAWS.
Doug: Right, but it's also...
Jean: We have more trouble with accessibility with it than we do JAWS.
Doug: With Kurzweil, but Kurzweil is a stand-alone device. I mean it's software, I don't mean stand-alone that way, but it's a...
Penny: It's a scan and read.
Doug: Yeah, it's a specific task; it's not a screen reader.
Penny: It just OCRs.
Jean: What it does is it goes out on the internet and it scans the page that you're on. If you go behind it, you'll see that the webpage is actually in Kurzweil and it's reading the webpage. So, it reads webpages.
Penny: That's three thousand.
Doug: Yeah, that's three thousand. It's not one thousand.
Jean: But it's for a larger population.
Doug: It's LD again. Alot of people are having a problem with three thousand. Oh, I have a fellow that I've worked with as a colleague who's been off doing a lot of special training now on people who have come back from Iraq who have been blown to pieces. They're having to use JAWS and Dragon and Kurzweil and the problem is that the agency, the group that buys this sort of stuff, has been ordering stuff that just doesn't work together. The classic Dragon and three thousand. It's a bad combination. Three thousand is trickier. Unless you have a specific need for it, I don't know any real good justification to use it. I know my colleague just hates it.
Jean: Well, we have probably over a hundred students using it very successfully. But, at East Bay, I'm not used to not being there anymore.
Deborah: What do you mean when you say we.
Doug: The only thing out there that doesn't scan, and I can't compare by any means, but you might want to take a look at something called...
Jean: My question basically is how is it part of this testing? No matter what it is. It's considered a screen reader, because it will read what is on the screen, rather it's whatever kind of electronic document is on the screen. It reads it.
Doug: It's not a full-fledged screen reader. Like, I can't go in and read my e-mail.
Jean: Yeah, you can.
Doug: Or, check things in my control panel and so on.
Jean: It doesn't read the Windows operating system. But it reads web pages and it reads electronic documents. So, I'm just listing, but it sounds like it's more limited.
Doug: So, are they using it instead of JAWS.
Jean: No, a learning disabled student doesn't need to have the screen read to them, no.
Doug: Right, exactly.
Jean: They don't have any orientation difficulties, but they do have accessibility difficulties.
Deborah: So, you're wondering if we should be testing for that...with that?
Doug: It wouldn't do any harm. It is the number one product for learning disabled access. It's an area that a lot of people don't know anything about.
Jean: There's a study going on as well to test it to see how well it's being used with the general population and how it changes reading skills and all that, you know if you start at a young age.
Speaker: So, if you're testing with JAWS, and you take a product and you're testing with JAWS and you're testing with Kurzweil, what's your conclusion in terms of weighting and ranking and is it 508 compliant? Because your AT is different.
Penny: It will eliminate a specific task that students need to do. I standardize on K one thousand because I have more blind students and low vision students that need access than LD students. There are too many bells and whistles in K three thousand. The way I work with my LD students was type in your stuff, if you're dyslexic, I'll edit it for you and I'll have Kurzweil read back your paper, you know because they're auditory learners and then they can go in and make changes, or they can go in and use JAWS to have a screen reader to go back and read as they're typing in their words. They are kind of like apples and oranges. Three thousand has a word processor built right in.
Deborah: As we're saying that as we're doing our testing, I guess it's part of developing these protocols, is developing a set of tasks that we expect different products to do, and we'll be testing with a variety of different circumstances.
Jean: Like if you were testing Kurzweil with blackboard, and you were considering buying blackboard, then you would say it doesn't pass unless when somebody opens another document or another window, it's a new window, because it's hard to describe it.
Penny: But then blackboard will go away. (laughing)
Jean: I think it ought to be in the protocol. For some elements, not for everything.