Autism Awareness Month: Social Stories That Speak
The step-by-step visual approach makes Social Stories also suitable for providing instruction to young children and people with poor communication skills.
Social stories can be generic, such as those created for use in a school. But in the case of autism, they are often created with a particular individual and built with an increasing level of complexity. Social stories created for a particular individual could also benefit from using images of real people (mom, dad, brother, teacher …) and the real environment (home, playground, school …), which could help reinforce the message and clarify the context.
In this article, we suggest using a tool like SlideTalk to add spoken instructions, rather than textual instructions, to support images. Which is what we call Talking Social Stories. Using spoken commands makes it easy to access the Social Stories model for young children or others with limited reading skills.
The SlideTalk video below is an example of what a talking social story would look and sound like. This particular video from Talking Social Story explains why and how to wear seat belts, and was originally created with a particular individual in mind. The voice (which is provided by Text-to-Speech) is used at a slightly slower speed than usual, and some additional pauses are added to provide more time to look at the image before moving on to the next image. You can learn to control SlideTalk's text-to-speech voice by accessing the FAQ.
Using text-to-speech for voiceover ensures consistency in tone and style between different talking social story episodes, which can be particularly important when done with a specific individual in mind. Recognition of familiar tone and style could help the individual focus on the message and not be distracted by recording details such as background noise and different sound quality.
You can create your first talking social story right away by visiting SlideTalk and using the free access.
The images and script for this Social Story example were taken from the Autism Spectrum Directory blog.
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Slidetalk
Connect with your audience using engaging and efficient conversation videos. SlideTalk turns your PowerPoint presentation into engaging talking videos ready to be shared. Automatic voiceover is generated using high-quality, multilingual text-to-speech.