Deektay

A dictation app.

Dictation

Dictation is a popular exercise in primary and middle schools in many countries, especially as France.

Deektay is a single-page static web app for self-assessed dictation exercices. Just drop a bunch of audio files in a folder, a .txt file, and an index.html, and Deektay generates the user interface.

See https://defeo.lu/deektay for a demo.

Who needs Deektay?

Deektay is primarily meant for teachers. However, using it requires some advanced skills such as:

• Recording and converting audio files,
• Editing a plain text file,
• Hosting static web pages.

It will thus only be useful to a rare breed of teachers:

┌────────────────────┐
│     Language       │
│     Teachers       │
│        ┌───────────┤─────┐
│        │  Deektay  │     │
└────────┼───────────┘     │
	 │      Computer   │
	 │       Geeks     │
         └─────────────────┘

Usage

1. Chose a text for dictation.

2. Record it, one sentence per file. We recommend using Audacity, but you may also find Castaphone useful.

3. Optionally convert the files to several audio formats (see compatibility below).

4. Put all audio files in a folder, together with a data.txt file formatted like:

   file1.ogg,file1.mp3,file1.aac: The sky above the port was the color of television,
                                : The sky above the port was the colour of television,
   file2.ogg,file2.mp3,file2.aac: tuned to a dead channel.
   

   Each line being of the form

   [list of files]: <sentence>
   

   where [list of files] is an optional, comma separated, list of audio files, all meant to be an audio recording of the same sentence; and <sentence> is the corresponding text. If the list of files is missing, <sentence> is understood as an alternate spelling for the sentence on the previous line.

   See also docs/data.txt.

5. Also put an index.html file in the same folder. See docs/index.html for an example.

6. Upload the folder to a web server.

7. Send the link to your students.

Compatibility

Deektay was developed with high compatibility in mind. As far as we know, it is compatible with desktop and mobile browsers released as far back as 2013, such as Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 20, etc.

However, while Deektay itself is compatible with most browsers, the audio files themselves may have troubles loading. At the time of writing, the most widely supported audio format is .aac (or .mp4, it's the same), followed closely by .mp3 and .ogg. We recommend converting your audio files to each of these formats, and using the comma separated syntax shown above to provide alternative recordings for the same sentence.

Here's a quick table of format support:

	Chrome	Firefox	IE	Edge	Safari
aac	Yes	(Yes)	Yes	Yes	Yes
wav	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
mp3	Yes	≥71	Yes	Yes	Yes
ogg	Yes	Yes	No	(No)	No

For more information, see this Wikipedia page.

Configuring, language

The standard way to load Deektay is:

var deektay = new Deektay('data.txt', { 
    lang: 'fr',
    element: '#deektay',
    type: 'guess',
	check_caps: false,
});
deektay.start()

See for example, docs/index.html.

A few options can be configured:

• The data file can be named aything you want. Just change 'data.txt' to the correct file name.

• lang indicates the language of the user interface. Current choices are 'en', 'fr', and 'it'. Default is fr.

  If you would like to see another language supported, please open an issue.

• element indicates the tag where Deektay should insert itself. Default is '#deektay'.

• type is the type of data.txt. Choices are: text for text file, json for Json files, and guess (default) which guesses based on the file extension.

  The text format is documented above. The json format is

  [
    {
      media: ['file1.ogg', 'file1.mp3', 'file1.aac'],
      sentence: [
        'The sky above the port was the color of television',
        'The sky above the port was the colour of television',
      ],
    },
  ]

  If you don't understand what this means, you probably want to use the text format.

• check_case indicates whether Deektay matching should be case-sensitive or not. Default is not.

Developers

To generate the polyfilled minified file, first install Babel with

npm install

Then

npm run minify