I will be particpating in a panel about accessible online text content and electronic books for people with disabilities at the most important French book fair called the “Salon du Livre” on March 17 from 11h30 to 13h.  The audio channel for electronic books is a hot topic right now with all the noise being made by Amazon’s Kindle 2 launch.  I think that it speaks for itself that a major player like Amazon is introducing text-to-speech to facilitate access to digital text content and shows that the audio dimension is becoming a must have for many platforms.

We are now working on developing more widgets and plug-in’s for various blog and website platforms. So far we have released widgets and plug-ins for the following platforms;

• Wordpress blos (not wordpress.com)
• Joomla 1.5 websites and blogs
• TypePad
• Blogger

The widgets and plug-ins are there to make the implementation of the ReadSpeaker webReader service as simple as possible, so that it wouldn’t require much HTML knowledge to get going. 

Please help us by letting us know what platforms we should support next!

First of all please forgive us if we haven’t mentioned you in this post. We would like to thank you all for writing about ReadSpeaker webReader and for the dozens and dozens of really nice  suggestions,  ideas, help that is going into this now live product! Chris Hogg of the Digital Journal has been very helpful with his remarks which are spot on! Amongst the numerous articles about us, thanks also to Eric Barkin from SpeechTechMagazine, Philippe Poux from Vocal News, Eric Dupin from his Presse Citron blog, Vincent Abry, Fredzone, Feedmyapp, to name a few! We would also like to thank the growing webReader community which is really contributing with some interesting feedback. This is just the start of this new adventure and we are certaily looking at the next few months with great expectations on making ReadSpeaker webReader better and better! Thanks again!

We are currently working very hard to fix a lot of pronunciation corrects (words that are read in a strange/funny/wrong way) in the text-to-speech voices. No text-to-speech engines are perfect, so sometimes it is needed to “learn” it how certain words should be pronounced.

Words such as Foreign words, brand names, technical expressions, abbreviations and person names can be a bit tricky for the TTS to pronounce since they are usually exceptions not following the “rules” of the language. All languages are made up by rules and exceptions, and the list of the latter is almost endless.

You can help!

If you come across words that you should say belong to the  “common” category, please let us know. You can use the Customer Service/Feedback menu on http://webreader.readspeaker.com

I am happy to see that hundreds of blog- and small website owners have signed up and created a webReader account. I am even more happy to see that so many have already implemented the Listen buttons and that so many have blogged about it. 

We would really like to get as much feedback as possible from users and the early adopters about the webReader so that we can improve the services and enhance the user experience. So, please let us know what you think. 

You can either comment here on this blog, or use the Customer Service/Feedback menu on the http://webreader.readspeaker.com  website.