‘WYNNing’ Technology

WYNN text-to-speech literacy software encapsulates a wealth of intuition and special education experience on the part of Roberta Brosnahan, its chief conceptual designer. Her experiences with students led to deep understandings of language acquisition and individual reading styles. When she came to Freedom Scientific, her vision extended far beyond early reading systems that were simple re-workings of screen readers for the blind. To accomplish her goal, she insisted that she be hired with,

An equal voice to the developers, or we would have a product that again was more of a technical tool than an educational tool. It was very important to me!

Over the last decade, WYNN has established a dominant market position by offering a simple, intuitive interface.

It features a non-cluttering, unique rotating tool bar with buttons to control related sets of functions; word prediction; homophone support; MP3 and WAVE conversion; DAISY and NIMAS support; email reading; and is compatibility with web-based learning platforms which are becoming ubiquitous in postsecondary education.

Learn more about TestTalker

Apropos of her role as Product Manager, Beth Thomlinson, who also arrived at Freedom Scientific with years of product experience in the AT industry, highlights that TestTalker, a companion product, should be viewed as a congruent product designed to allow students to demonstrate their mastery after WYNN has helped to build learning. It targets effective interaction with standardized and individual tests that are highly secure but equivalently accessible through spotlighting, speech, and other appropriate features. Beth explains that since the functionality of TestTalker mirrors that of WYNN, it avoids introducing any operational difficulties when students undergo assessment that might confound results. It also permits access to worksheets and electronic forms.

WYNN as a Barometer of Successes… and Continuing Needs

Wynn is emblematic of how a premier, early-release AT product can garner a track record of successes that bring unique leadership opportunities. One of those is its recent selection for an independent, seminal study with the three-million dollar project, the National Center for the Study of Supported Electronic Text. It is indeed an honor for WYNN to be specifically selected for a study of this magnitude and scope. However, the study also reveals the sense that the participation of technological supports in the improvement of comprehension and learning is not fully explored or proven to the satisfaction of all constituencies or for all adoption purposes. The quest to use scientifically based research to firmly validate what visionaries like Roberta recognized years ago, continues.

Simplicity as a Design Principle for Specialized Interaction

Describing the design philosophy for WYNN, Roberta begins with a simultaneous recognition of very involved mental processes in reading and the concomitant need for simplicity in technological interaction:

The reading and learning process is obviously a very complex process involving phonemics and phonetics as well as attention, focus, fluency, and comprehension. We set out to create a very easy-to-use interface so people could use the learning aspects of the product—and teachers from an educational vantage point—rather than having to technically work ‘on’ it.

She continues,

Universal design for learning is a wonderful concept. Without having those specific words available, when I envisioned this product ten years ago, it was because I understood that students learn differently. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic—each of us ties these dimensions together in specific ways. That was the ‘given’ that I began with.

From my vantage point, one of the most important things in the classroom is to avoid beating on a student’s weaknesses: move to their strengths and see if you can use them to work through weaker areas. We know people who use these products work harder and longer to do the same amount of work, so our simple user-interface that doesn’t require drop-down menus allows us to use this ’strength’ position if you have eye-hand coordination, visual tracking, or reading issues. The glory of technology is that it individualizes the study process.

Beth is quick to add evidence of the success of this principle,

We have teachers who tell us, ‘This is something my students can learn with. They go away from it for a week and come back, and we don’t have to re-teach them. They’re spending their time learning, not learning the technology.’

Additional Product Highlights

Beth is especially keen to emphasize WYNN’s broad masking capabilities for text and the internet, which she views as integral in supporting the reading process as the highlighting capabilities WYNN and other products also employ (to actively capture and mark a specific section of text for study or inclusion in a paper, for instance). She relates that,

Masking is a unique feature in our product in which we gray out—shade—everything on the page except the area the user designates as the focus. So all those distracting elements in text and especially on web pages—Roberta calls them ‘dancing monkeys,’ are eliminated so you can concentrate just on the words you are reading.

She adds,

Our recent attention has been on a seamless web access experience. We had the same focus on developing a web interface that would be easy to use as we did for the rest of WYNN. Today’s students do so much work online—we wanted to make their web browsing experience as easy and straightforward as possible. Instead of taking a small part of our product and putting it on the internet, we had a completely different and unique approach. We bring the internet inside our product.

Views on Scientifically Based Research and Product Improvement

WYNN’s development was heavily influenced by a purposeful, two-year research period involving interviews and observations with people using early text-to-speech products at UC Berkeley. Despite these origins, Roberta sees AT research as fraught with complexity:

Research for small companies is very difficult. A company shouldn’t pay for research—it won’t necessarily be valid. On the other hand, with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the difficulty has been that schools want the research to say WYNN, or a competitor, is “the” product. This has led some companies to do research themselves.

Cooperative research in the classroom setting is very challenging, she says. As with other profiled companies, even with the ‘carrot’ of free technology and seemingly convergent values of school districts and AT developers in regard to special populations, differing institutional cultures and concerns make classroom research challenging. Roberta explains,

I try to get independent parties interested in doing research on us and see if they will at least say that it was done on an OCR program like WYNN. That would help the industry, all of the AT vendors.

Roberta further questions the generalizations that can be made for systems whose rich feature sets create numerous opportunities for individualization. This robust type of product is, in essence, scores of different products depending on how the user configures it:

From a research vantage point, limiting a study to one feature for comparison and simplicity makes a lot of sense. From the way students’ study, I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense.

She notes that her observations in Berkeley led directly to WYNN’s feature of bookmarking, which suffices for users who were bothered by highlighting and underlining, and can turn those functions off.  It is Roberta’s hope that consumers of research data will critically review the sources and purposes involved when making comparisons and balance that against individual learning styles.

Beth explains that she has a narrower focus with product development. Most changes are the result of monitored feedback from users, teachers, rehab counselors, administrators, and other groups, whom she often recruits for formal beta evaluation. She credits a very structured focus group at the Closing the Gap conference with industry professionals as essential in the success of WYNN’s web browsing capabilities.

Standards and Legislation

Roberta has a practical view of standards, and muses:

I think, for example, NIMAS is one of those things that is needed. It’s like the civil rights movement in which you’ve got to have some people out there forging the path and progress comes slowly. You don’t see that you’ve made a lot of progress until you look back twenty years and say, ‘Look, these people are having a better experience than those two decades ago.’  Standards take twenty plus years!

In that vein, she applauds CAST’s (an organization dedicated to universal design for learning) efforts for further advancements. But says,

While these standards are being created and embraced, what drives me is to ask, ‘What can we do to help students today?’

Teachers ‘Get It!’

Roberta evinces frustration regarding funding and identification requirements. She says,

Many educators acknowledge that 30% of our students are struggling in school. Yet, unless the student has an I.E.P. they cannot use many of these beneficial technologies. So, due to the hidden nature of learning disabilities and a lack of money available for schools to spend on technological supports, we all have continuing challenges.

Always seeking to accentuate the positive, though, she shares her observation:

The good news is that teachers have reached enough of a comfort level that they are very, very strong supporters of adopting technology to help students. That’s a real change I’ve seen over the last ten years.

Evolution in Market Focus

Roberta is increasingly looking beyond the traditional AT industry segment, driven in large part by effects of NCLB regulations, explaining:

While five years ago it was true we were solidly in the AT industry, we’re no longer thinking of it as an ‘AT world’ and a ‘general education world’. Nowadays we’re kind of straddling the fence between AT and struggling readers. NCLB means students in general need to reach the AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) goals that have been set. Our products can help school districts’ students reach those goals. It goes back to universal design—there is a continuum of needs. If you believe we all learn a little differently and technology can assist an individual to optimize their learning, then it seems that ‘AT’ has a different meaning.

She affirms that,

This is having an impact on our marketing activities… and on development, too. We do not want to limit our thinking by a small group of people and a small group of needs. We still make sure that everything we do is ’spot-on’ effective for kids with IEP’s, but we want to develop for broader sets of needs. We’re putting less money into AT conferences and more into others… we’re exploring!

Freedom Scientific has just announced that Meredith College is offering to install WYNN on all student laptops, an indication Roberta’s argument that literacy software can benefit students with varying learning styles and requirements, is gaining traction.

Roberta also sees huge potentials in the integration of technologies like WYNN with tailored curricula, but feels this necessitates partnerships with publishers. The conditions for such a new stage seem to be evolving with time. She remains hopeful, and, again… patient.

Cooperating AT’s

Roberta provocatively suggests that technology creates specialized forms of interaction, saying,

There is some different type of educational learning that is going on with the use of technology. I’m not sure what it is but it seems to be an assist to the learning process (as compared to traditional methods). I do think that the tool becomes a participant in learning—an extension of our skill that provides a dramatic benefit.

Finally, Beth wraps up by echoing  the general theme of expansion of AT’s into general educational uses:

Here’s another way of looking at this with another piece of technology. Smartboards have become very popular in classrooms. We have seen some of the more creative teachers take our product, use it on a Smartboard, and teach the whole class. They teach it to them visually, change it around, have class participation, and then the students go back and work individually with the tool. It is helping them do better!