One of the things I like about the ICT in Education site (he says modestly) is that you can listen to the articles as well as read them. It means that the articles are accessible to sight-impaired people. But when I upload presentations, that is no longer true. At least, not until now.

The website Hello Slide makes it possible for you to upload a presentation and then add audio. You can also embed the slide show in a web page, or publish a link to it. The quality of the audio is pretty good in that it does not sound entirely robotic. The voice is very English-sounding, though whether that is true outside of the UK I am unable to say. Here is a test one I created, so you can judge for yourself:

The new landscape

Unfortunately, any notes that you type in PowerPoint, or the text on the slides, are not automatically converted to audio. You have to add that by typing text into a box, or copying and pasting it from somewhere else. Still, it is pretty good, and I have a feeling I will be using this from now on. You can have up to 50 presentations there free. After that, you pay, for which you get a bigger presentations allowance plus auto-translation plus export to video.

This article first appeared in Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for educational ICT professionals.