Finally! proReader has arrived – the superior reading experience! No download required!

ReadSpeaker “proReader”; the next generation accessibility tool to make websites speak has arrived. We have for many years been asked to add the function of highlighting the text that is currently read. There was no simple way to do that on a server-side solution. There are always options to create programs that the users could install and run, but that wouldn’t really be a service that the website offered would it? After over one year of focused R & D we finally came up with a solution, and after a couple of months of user group testing and studies, we are now ready to launch: The proReader!ProReader is a packaged solution for medium size customers that want to make the text content on their websites as accessible as possible for people with special needs.

Customize the reading experience

The unique thing with proReader is that it is very easy to use for the ones that just want to listen, but it also gives many options to the user when it comes to customizing the reading experience. The user can choose to have the reading in different speeds, choose if the text should be highlighted dynamically as it is being read (per word/sentence or both), choose font, text size, colors and more…

Reading to everyone

As always when we design a ReadSpeaker service, we have made sure that the speech function is available for everyone and everywhere. This is regardless of what web browser is used and what client side scripting the user has available in his browser. All thanks to the server side technology. To use the basic functionality of proReader, all that is required is a (any) web browser running on a device that can play back mp3 audio. Including many mobile devices (however most mobile devices will only support the playback by selecting the “download mp” link).Creating a user interface that is rich with features and at the same time is easy to use requires a lot of research and user group testing. The initial responses during our beta testing period have been good, and we are already beginning to collect suggestions and wishes for the next version.

Intelligence of the masses

With proReader, which shows its user interface in a new window, the user has the possibility of sending feedback and report words that are not pronounced correctly so that our computer linguists can further improve the quality of the reading. Thanks to the ReadSpeaker general pronunciation dictionaries which are shared by all customers, everybody will benefit from the new pronunciation fixes. With the support of the mass intelligence out there, linguists can focus more on solving issues rather than search from them. The winners in the end are the users, which can experience a better sounding reading.

We have been in the business of speech-enabling web sites since 1999, date at which I had the idea to bring text-to-speech into the arena of web sites. What was my motivation for doing so? I realised that a certain number of people around me had problems or felt uncomfortable reading text found on web sites. Sure, screen readers were already around and TTS had been built into operating systems but these options were simply not used by these users who I questioned hard about how they would like web sites to function. On the other side I thought to myself that for a web site owner it would be a useful feature to help users get an easier and free access to the audio version of their content without having to take care and worry about developing, installing, maintaining and updating this themselves. The combination of those 2 findings gave birth to ReadSpeaker which was commercially launched in Sweden back in 2001.

At the beginning I had a very focused idea of which web site owners this would appeal to. I started approaching the public sector as well as web sites that were aimed at disability groups. At the beginning the end users who I thought about were mainly people who suffered from dyslexia and other various reading disabilities. Then a strange thing happened. I started getting feedback from users that I had not even thought of would use ReadSpeaker. These were senior citizens who appreciated the comfort of having the choice between reading or listening the text content of web sites. These were foreigners living in Sweden who liked to be able to listen to Swedish instead of reading it. These were students who could listen to lessons by saving the mp3 file to their mobile devices. These were “information workers” who in their fast paced environments needed to listen to web content while taking care of other tasks at the same time. These were….well you got me, the circle of users kept and keeps on getting bigger and bigger. This trend also had an effect on the customers that we started approaching and that were also increasingly contacting us. From the narrower group of public and disability web sites, we started implementing ReadSpeaker on a greater variety of areas like the banking sector, the insurance companies, transport organisations, online media, etc.

What happened next was very interesting, but more on that in another (soon to come) post

A few days ago Google announced that they begin to experiment with text-to-speech on their “Knol”.

Quote from their site: “We are experimenting with Audio Playback as an option for some knols, starting with a handful of English language featured knols. You can listen using our Flash player, or by downloading an mp3 file and using any mp3 player.”

If a listen-button is shown next to the “print” and “share” button, you know that the Knol is available also as audio.

Read all about it and try it out here: http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/knol-audio-playback/

The other day I was standing in the hotel bar watching the TV. The volume was turned down completely but thanks to the real-time captioning I was able to follow the news broadcast. The day after, I was spending some hours waiting for my delayed flight at Heathrow airport to get ready for departure. There was a TV on the waiting area, again with the volume turned down. This time there was no captioning. However, they did have a sign-language narrator in the bottom right corner of the screen. That didn’t help me much since I can’t understand sign language. I was experience “Situational Disability”. In this case, text would have helped everybody that could read.Now, what about Audio? There are a great number of reasons why audio version of the text is as universal as text version of audio. Take reading a news article as an example. It is fairly difficult (not to say dangerous) to read today’s edition of the International Herald Tribune when driving a car. Text just simply doesn’t do very well in that situation. Reading it on a small mobile display is also not the best way to consume the article. If you have some kind of disability that makes it difficult to read ANY text you are in about the same situation. The fact that we want to consume written text in a situation when that is not possible (or convenient) somehow makes us all disabled. It is the situation that creates the handicap, not necessarily our abilities.