Using memrise and other resources if you are blind

[LeooeL]

Hello hello!

I have a student who is blind and wants to learn German at the moment.
He has screen readers and so on, but has problems using highly interactive sites like Memrise and Duolingo,
Do you maybe know some workarounds for this?
I would really love to make it possible for him to use those tools and would also be very thankful for any advise regarding other resources which could help me helping him.

Thanks a lot in advance and have an awesome start into the week!

Leo

[Arete_Hime (Ultra-Sadist Delinquent)]

I’m not learning German, so I am not aware of other resources, but this should get you started:

What resources besides Memrise are you using to learn German?

Are you using other flash cards services? Websites with grammar exercises? Share them with us! Resources mentioned: Duolingo - vocabulary, grammar; Deutsche Welle - courses, podcasts and news; Grimm Grammar - grammar review and exercises; Lingolia - grammar; Lang-8 - writing practice; rbb Radio - listening; Your Daily German - German blog explaining aspects of the language; Dict.cc - one of the best multilingual German dictionaries. Busuu Schritte International books - …

Your question is interesting I think, but first I’d like to broaden it to: “I’m blind and want to learn a language on my computer/phone, how best to go about that?”

1. My first step would be to do a Google search for something like “Blind learn a language.” Could you do that and report back to us your findings?

I’d probably find a wealth of information like that. Ignoring that for now, next steps would perhaps be:

2. I’d probably decide I would not want to subject myself to text-to-speech, so any course I would take would probably be Native Audio > Typing / Audio input / Audio multiple choice.

3. Next perhaps would be to decide which platform to use. So another Google or forum search on that. It absolutely has to have spaced repetition. I’m personally only aware of Anki, Memrise, and Cerego, with Memrise not being the superior choice.

4. Having decided on the platform, it’s time to make or search for courses. That would be your job as the teacher.

5. If you decide on Memrise, know that course creation is a pain, as although you can bulk add items, you cannot bulk add audio without scripting.

6. If you decide on Memrise, the website shouldn’t be a problem to use after you’ve added the courses you want to study, after adding some userscripts: [wiki] All the Userscripts

(The above may link to outdated scripts, most commonly where the @match does not match the new https site, fix here)

Useful userscripts would perhaps be

Memrise Timer Disabler
Memrise Turbo

@cooljingle’s scripts
memrise-all-typing
memrise-infinite-learning (use in reviewing, not learning, sessions, I think)
memrise-no-reverse-translations (depending on the course)

You can also add userstyles to not show anything but that what you to see (or show to the screen reader).

On course creation, once I was more advanced, I would look into this:

Subs2srs: automatically generate audio clips from movies and tv series

Thanks to @Charles_Applin35 for mentioning this. I think this deserves its own topic: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Subs2srs If learning in context is your thing (and it should be), this is an invaluable help. subs2srs is a small utility that allows you to create Anki import files based on your favorite foreign language movies and TV shows to aid in the language learning process. This utility will parse through a subtitle file, extract the dialog and timing information, and then …

Edit: my ideal course would probably be: Target Language Audio – Native Language Audio, the target language audio plays and you decide if you know it or not (on a 1-4 scale perhaps) (that decides the spacing algorithm), whether you know it or not, the native language audio plays after you’ve made your choice. You could perhaps use TTS, like Ivona, for the native language audio. And if you go with the subtitles you could also machine-translate them, and check them manually, to get literal translations.

For audio sentences, there is a site that allows you to download the audio sentences from tatoeba. Perhaps I’ll look later for that.

Ankidroid or similar would perhaps be the best choice.

[lizzy.harrison.37c2]

Hi,

I’m really interested in finding a solution to this problem because Memrise is such a great resource. Did you ever find a way to use Memrise if you are blind or visually impaired?

Thanks