Functional illiteracy is a problem that is often hidden, the more so in industrialised countries where it stands as a living scar with respect to schooling systems which were designed to avoid such situations. That is why I thought it would be interesting to share with you the study that the French National Agency against Functional Illiteracy (ANLCI) has published.

In France, functional illiteracy or illettrisme, applies to someone who has been to school until the legal age of 16 and who doesn’t have a sufficient level of reading, writing and basic numerical skills to be self-supporting in every day life situations. The word illettrisme was first coined by the founder of ATD Quart Monde, Joseph Wresinski. The ANLCI makes the distinction between illettrisme and analphabetism which concerns people who have never been to school and French as a foreign language for people who arrive in France not knowing how to speak French.

The study was conducted in 2004-2005 on a population panel of ten thousand people aged 18 to 65 living in Metropolitan France. Here are the main findings:

• 9% of the population aged 18 to 65 living in France and having received schooling in France are in situation of functional illiteracy. That is 3,100,000 people.
• Of these 3,100,000 people, over half are aged 45+.
• The proportion of people who are functionally illiterate is highest amongst the age bracket 56 to 65 (14% vs the overall percentage of 9).
• Men are more prone than women to be functionally illiterate : 59% vs 41% for women.
• Functional illiteracy is equally present in rural and urban areas.
• Over half of the people (57%) who are functionally illiterate have a job. That represents 1.8 million people. The unemployed have a 15% rate of functional illiteracy.
• 74% of the people with functional illiteracy only spoke French at home as of age 5.

Several comments on these results. It is often thought that functional illiteracy affects younger generations but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Another element which is surprising is the very high rate amongst employed people.  Also, policies to help decrease the rate of illiteracy have to be evenly spread between rural and urban areas.

With 10 years of experience in speech enabling the web, it is more than time to broaden the scope than just making content speak on the web and in mobile phones. In these 10 years, as you all know, the web has gone through a number of dramatic changes. From being all about information, it is now about transaction, interaction and socializing. How can web based speech enabling improve these areas? To start with, text is still the problem to a lot of people. Statistics about reading difficulties for example have not changed just because the web has moved forward. Actually, the more that day to day activities get online, the greater the digital divide gets. Exclusion rather than inclusion. That doesn’t feel so 2010.

Sure, speech enabling the web is not the answer to all questions and is not the answer to all prayers, but it sure is a means in reducing the digital divide.

On-line banking and other financial services, government and company e-Services, E-commerce, surveys etc all interact with the users with some kind of online form where they can exercise various tasks whenever they like. Apart from being very convenient for the user, it is also a cost saver for the organization offering these services. Automated processes, case handling systems, online customer support services make a large number of organizations more efficient. However, have they made all necessary efforts to make the front end as usable and accessible as possible?

Not making a form accessible and usable is as wise as putting a 1,76 meter tall and 0,48 meter wide door 50 centimeters from the ground as the only entrance to the supermarket. With average height, width and gymnastic skills you can come in, and if not, you don’t.

Since we know that speech enabling does help a lot of people, we developed a prototype of what came to be ReadSpeaker formReader. We implemented it on a few forms (e-services) at a municipality website in Sweden. We also gathered a test group with people from different disability groups (plus a few elderly and some non-native speaking persons). After the test phase, we did as we normally do when developing a new product, we went back to the drawing table incorporating the results from the user tests. Speech enabling forms helps. To be able to have audio prompts that tell you what to fill in and a voice that reads back what you have written/chosen proves to be very useful. With more people being able to fill out the forms themselves, and fill them in accurately (thanks to the “proof listening”), the organization offering the service gets a better value for their investment.

And since formReader works pretty much like a screen reader, the requirements on the forms are the same. Meaning that they should be properly coded according W3C/WCAG guidelines.

During the implementation of the formReader on the municipality website, a couple of easily solvable accessibility issues became very obvious and were easily corrected by the municipality web developers. So the result was, regardless if you chose to activate formReader or not, a better and more accessible web form.

CSUN2010_ReadSpeaker_formReader_Presentation

We have just launched today our latest product, ReadSpeaker® formReader™. It is a web based service which helps users fill in forms by reading out loud both the fields as well as the text entered by the user. It is like having your own personal voice assistance to help you correctly fill in forms. The user can at any time decide to activate/deactivate the ReadSpeaker formReader feature.

We see the following advantages in speech-enabling your online forms:

• It provides your users with an easy “voice check” of what fields they are inputting content with and what text they have typed in.
• It increases the number of users who will fill out your forms by providing an audio access for all those that have reading disabilities.
• It helps reduce incoming mails/calls by making it clearer, easier to fill in your forms thereby providing a potential cost-saver.
• And as with all our products, ReadSpeaker formReader is web based so no downloads are required.

ReadSpeaker formReader can be used for areas such as:

• Tax and other administrative declarations
• Shopping/order forms
• Customer/personal information
• Surveys

Nestlé have launched our latest product, ReadSpeaker docReader on the About Us page of their web site. Now, Nestlé web site users can have access to a speaking version of these PDFs. When users click on the above Listen links on the About Us page, this is what they can see:

The toolbar enables users to easily navigate between pages either with the previous / next buttons or by going directly to a specific page. The layout mode preserves the original layout but you can also opt for the text mode to choose specific text mode settings such as text appearance, font size and font face. Our highlighting feature which works both in the layout and text modes helps users better understand the text which is being read by dynamically highlighting words and/or sentences:

Other settings are also available such as selecting reading speed and choosing the word and sentence highlighting colours when you click on the Settings button of the ReadSpeaker docReader toolbar:

We are very proud to welcome KidsHealth as one of our newest customers. KidsHealth is a kind of “3 in 1″ web site since it has sections specifically dedicated for parents, kids and teens. In the words of KidsHealth; “If you’re looking for information you can trust about kids and teens that’s free of “doctor speak,” you’ve come to the right place. KidsHealth is the most-visited site on the Web for information about health, behavior, and development from before birth through the teen years.”

On a typical weekday, more than 500,000 people visit KidsHealth.

KidsHealth is more than just the facts about health. As part of The Nemours Foundation’s Center for Children’s Health Media, KidsHealth also provides families with perspective, advice, and comfort about a wide range of physical, emotional, and behavioral issues that affect children and teens.

We are launching today a new addition to our family of products, ReadSpeaker docReader. ReadSpeaker docReader is an online software service that allows users to listen to PDFs, Word documents and a variety of other document formats. It converts these documents in a web readable format, while preserving the original layout. ReadSpeaker docReader makes various document formats viewable in all browsers, even on mobile phone browsers as well as other devices that do not have built in PDF-, Word- or Open Office document viewing capabilities.

We see web sites as a mosaic of different components. We have our web reading services for speech-enabling web pages like ReadSpeaker Enterprise for larger organizations, ReadSpeaker proReader for medium sized entities and ReadSpeaker webReader for smaller sites and blogs. Then we have products that tackle the speech-enabling of RSS feeds by converting them into podcasts like ReadSpeaker podCaster and ReadSpeaker audioNews. The feedback we kept on getting back from our customers was what about online documents that you find on web sites such as PDF, Word or Open Office. We have used our existing products until now to do that but the result was not up to the level of excellence we wanted to have. That is how we started thinking about ReadSpeaker docReader to target the specific job of making online documents talk. By providing this new web based service we are ensuring that web site owners can offer an audio alternative for their online documents thereby increasing usability as well as accessibility. And as with all our products, you don’t need to download specific software or plug-ins to make ReadSpeaker docReader work.