United Press International has just added our ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding Player to their articles. We are thrilled to work with such a well known brand as UPI. The Listen feature is activated on all English text articles and will soon also be implemented on the Spanish language version of the site. UPI will shortly be adding ads within the player area in context with the written content of the article being speech-enabled.

I often use Thalys to go from our Paris office to our management meetings in our Dutch office in Huis ter Heide. So far, apart from the train being much slower on the Belgian and Dutch side and the occasional delays, the service was good but not excellent.

Yesterday I was coming back on the train that leaves Rotterdam at 19h26 and is supposed to arrive in Paris at 22h35. Due to a power failure (that was known to Thalys since 18h), the train could not go to Paris and dropped us off at Breda. From there we took buses – that took 2 hours to arrive – that drove us to the Bruxelles train station. On the way, we had been promised that hotel rooms would be reserved for the 300 to 400 of us approximately. Upon arrival, we were dismayed that the not too experienced looking Thalys team told us that they were unable to find any rooms. The only plan B they had was to have us sleep in the standstill fully lit train at the station from 1 am to the first departure this morning at 6h45. I finally got to Paris at 8h10 so 9h35 late. When arriving in Paris, the local Thalys team seemed surprised about the whole situation…

I think this is a good example of all the wrong steps a company takes when it comes to one, if not the most important, part of the building blocks of an organization namely customer support.

Error #1 : the personnel on board Thalys was uninformed on what was really going on. Companies should ensure that the employees that are in direct contact with their customers should know as much as possible in real time. Is that so difficult in 2009?

Error #2 : it shows real fast when customer support hasn’t done its uttermost to help out. I just can’t believe that it is impossible to find a couple hundred rooms in a hotel rich city like Brussels.

Error #3 : it was obvious that no real contingency planning had been carried out. This seems really strange since you would imagine that this kind of incident must be planned for. There was little or no coordination between Thalys personnel and the staff at the different train stations involved. Customer support teams need to live and breathe these worst-case scenario plans so that the day they are needed actions run more or less smoothly.

Error #4 : not listening to your customers. One traveller told the Thalys staff at the Brussels station that in these difficult economic times there must have been a bus company that would have jumped on the opportunity of bringing us all to Paris and prove to Thalys that they could cope with these kind of emergencies. The Thalys staff just discarded that option without any explanation.

Error # 5 : not escalating the decision process. The somewhat junior staff at the Brussels station didn’t “call the boss”. That would have calmed down some of the travelers and could have perhaps brought about a more experienced view on how to find a reasonable solution (since staying in a standstill train for almost 6 hours is not an option).

Error #6 : not to give more than the damage is worth on paper. Thalys’s reimbursing policy is to give compensation of 20,50 or 100% in case of delays above 30, 60 or 120 minutes. Rules are nice to have, but in some extreme cases companies need to be much better than the rules. You need to build a memorable support experience where the customer really thinks that the company has gone way beyond its duty to solve the problem at hand.

I think that Thalys could have a look at how a company like Zappos goes about customer suppport. It’s not rocket science, it is about caring as much as possible for the human beings that buy your products and services and not treating them as a somewhat abstract vision of the customer.

We thought it would be a good idea to share with you a Q&A session we had with one of our customers about the thinking process that goes with giving a web site a voice. We are honoured to share the following discussion we had with Michael Clevestig, Senior Manager Online Marketing of  SITA who is the world’s leading specialist in air transport communication and IT solutions. SITA delivers and manages business solutions for airline, airport, GDS, government and other customers over the world’s most extensive network, which forms the communications backbone of the global air transport industry.

Q : How did you come up with the idea of speech-enabling your web site ?

A : When we re-did our web site in 2008, one of the main objectives was to provide different access channels for the various constituencies that visit our web site. We see our web site as a multi-faceted and dynamic media and wanted to go beyond the text version only. At the same time, we were looking for a way to introduce some of these new channels without having to engange in costly production costs. When we heard about ReadSpeaker, we thought this was a great way to emulate a speaking version based from our already existing text content.

Q : When you say « already existing text content » what did you have in mind ?

A : That is a good question ! We initially thought that ReadSpeaker provided pre-recorded messages that would need periodic updates. That is where we discovered that the ReadSpeaker application converted on-the-fly our text into speech. The process is entirely dynamic ; the ReadSpeaker application parses the html code on our web pages, converts it into text and then file streams the mp3 back to the user.

Q : How much effort did it take your Internet team to implement ReadSpeaker ?

A : Since ReadSpeaker is a web-based software, our implication was limited to the initial implementation of ReadSpeaker’s html based code in our content management system (CMS). The ReadSpeaker web-based software comes with a number of customisation features such as start and stop tags to determine which part of our pages sould be read, personnalisable and accessible flash players, custom owned dictionnaries where we could provide ReadSpeaker with certain abreviations that needed specific pronunciation. Once the ReadSpeaker software was implemented – and the support we got from the ReadSpeaker team during this phase was A-class – our part of the job was done. The advantage thereafter of using the web-based ReadSpeaker product is that we are always getting the best and latest version of the software and don’t have to periodically update it ourselves.

Q : Your web site doesn’t seem to be aimed at end users who have reading disabilities so why did you take the decision to add ReadSpeaker to it ?

A : Our web site is mostly used by professionals in the air transport industry which, in their vast majority, do not encounter reading problems. However, we feel that adding an audio dimension to our text content brings our site to the next level by introducing greater usability for all, irrespective of any disability. We see the listen function on our web site to be as natural as the print and email buttons we provide. Many of our visitors are busy professionals that operate in multi-task contexts and to be able to listen to our articles while doing something else has a value in itself.

Q : Would you recommend ReadSpeaker to the air transport industry ?

A : Definitely ! We see ReadSpeaker as a very useful tool that can be used for different types of web site visitors who have various needs. It is easy to implement and the team behind the product are experts in speech technologies.

In its latest Internet campaign lasting from May to September, Nestlé Extreme invites French Internet users to win one year of free cinema tickets by creating their own movie trailer. The trailers are produced using different characters, scenes, music, colours and last but not least voice-overs. For the latter, the agencies Creative Syndicate, Unit 9 and JWT Paris used our ReadSpeaker SpeechMachine product to enable website visitors to type in a text that is then converted to speech so as to create the voice-over for the trailer. This is a perfect example of ReadSpeaker SpeechMachine in action and how brands can innovatively use text-to-speech to add a fun audio outlet for their target public to play around with.

Here is how the campaign process looks when the website visitor is asked to input the text to create the voice-over for the trailer:

The movie director asking the candiadates to type in the text

And here is the actual text as it is being written in with the Listen button (Ecouter) at the right:

Image of text being inputted and Listen button

The official Nestlé Extreme trailer is on French television since May 25.

Stockholm launched a new website this spring and did it in a new way. Months before the launch they released a beta-version were they invited all the people in Stockholm to contribute and give opinions on how their website should be. They had a fully transparent and open dialogue with the citiziens and together the new stockholm.se took shape. The development was also documented on a public blog.

Stockholm gained a lot of publicity for this and many other municipalities around in Sweden have followed them. The city of Västerås have a beta version of the coming website up and running now. The city of Örebro launched their new website a couple of days ago and they also had a beta-version up a couple of weeks before the launch so the citiziens could get a chance to take part in the finalizing of the website.Web 2.0 is much about letting the users in. Not only to the ready made website. But already while developing it. Do you dare to let them decide what they like to find on the site? In what order? etc.

What the users want 

And talking about what the users want: All three examples above have implemented our well-integrated services. Stockholm and Västerås, the ReadSpeaker Enterprise as an integrated expanding Flash-player. That gives the best possible user experience for Win PC, Linux and Mac users. But there is of course also a noscript/ no flash alternative for mobile users and other users without Flash support.

Örebro have a very strong focus on usability/accessibility. So they wanted our ReadSpeaker proReader to give all the possible aid to people with different kind of challenges, such as reading and language difficulties.

I am sure other municipalities will follow these three. And the future is user generated/contributed development, platform independence and serverbased, neatly integrated audio versions of the content. Websites and services that demands a certain web browser (usually Internet Explorer) belongs to the history. And to speech-enable the site by offering a plugin that only work in IE is not accessibility in any means. More and more people will surf in to your website from an iPhone, Nokia N-series or other mobile devices. And they all have benefit of the audio version since the screens are so small. And they most certainly dont have any benefit of a plugin that only works in Windows PC and Internet Explorer.

Web 1.0 – 4.0

Some people mean we already have the Web 4.0 here. I heard this very good and short descriptions of the different web generations recently:

• Web 1.0: They
• Web 2.0: We
• Web 3.0: For Me
• Web 4.0: Always (and everywere)

How far have you reached in this development? Is your website a brochure stand or is it a living platform accessible for everyone, anywere, anyhow and anytime?

In a recent agreement, Target and the National Federation of the Blind settled for a class action lawsuit which had been filed by several blind users of the Target web site back in 2006.  One of the main points of the agreement is Target’s obligation to make their web site fully accessible by end of February 2009. So how should one read this agreement; glass half empty or half full? The pessismists will argue that the stick is not the best method to implement long-term changes within the private sector and that only a consistent, pedagogical process will bring companies to see the benefits of making their web sites accessible. The argument here is that this will only bring about short term and highly publicized marketing stunts and even possible ways to get around these class actions by bringing teams of lawyers to creatively combat them! I don’t think so.

For the first time, this type of news will send an alarm bell to the ears of the decision makers and provide a concrete point of reference for accessibility experts to make their case without having to dig into theoretical guidelines and reports. I think that lessons will be learned and that this could be a turning point for many other major company web sites to think twice before launching or updating web sites and taking into account all the added benefits of giving equal access to their online content.

It is of course important to use best practice methods when trying to implement accessibility advice but once in a while an an agreement like the one Target and the NFB have made is a very good awakener.

I noticed recently a press release that European commission published in July. The headline was: “Commission wants a web that is better enabled for the disabled“.

I was present at the conference in Riga in 2006 that followed after the MINISTERIAL DECLARATION was signed by all current member states. Paragraph number 25 declared that: “Promoting and ensuring accessibility of all public web sites by 2010, through compliance with the relevant W3C common web accessibility standards and guidelines.” The commissioner on Information, Society and Media, Viviane Reding said in her Key note speech in Riga that she will pull the ears of the ministers that didn’t realize the whole content of the declaration

In this press release she says that: “Access to internet websites is essential for many citizens in Europe, yet many simply cannot use them because of disabilities. As long as web accessibility for all is not a reality, many people miss out on the benefits of the Internet. There are such simple solutions to these issues – so why is it that so few web publishers actually implements them?” asks Viviane Reding in the press release. “The more people use the internet, the better for Europe’s economy and the richer becomes online content. I call on the web publishing industry and public sector administrations to make a much more determined effort to ensure the web is accessible to everyone. Those responsible should remember that in a few years time, they will probably find themselves amongst those having trouble to read the screen.”

But as the commission express slightly bitterly further on in the press release: “Despite repeated calls by the EU and government leaders to improve this situation, progress remains limited: by far the majority of websites fail to use universally accepted user-friendly solutions.”

There are just 17 months left until year 2010 and YES there are still a LOT inaccessible websites and information out there.

But this is a good and clear message from the Commission. And it is of course extra nice when they count speech-enabling of text as one of three “Web accessibility solutions”.

And since they are also a ReadSpeaker customer it gets super nice when they in the press release tell people to click on the speaker icon next to the headline at http://ec.europa.eu/roaming to test a “screen reader”.

ReadSpeaker is not a traditional screen reader (like “Jaws” that is usually used by visually impaired) but it does read the main text content that is displayed on the screen.

For more information see:

• EUs policy on web accessibility
• Viviane Redings homepage at the website of the EU
• Thematic portal of Europe’s Information Society

VoiceCorp has done it again! The official website for the City of San Francisco is one of the latest web sites to make their content more accessible by adding the ReadSpeaker read-aloud text-to-speech service to their web pages. Most of the pages on the website now have a ”Listen” button in the tool bar right next to the ”Print”, ”Text Only” and ”Font size” functions. Listen for yourself at http://www.sfgov.org/site/mayor_index.asp

Dow Jones have really understood what speech enabling is about. It is not just something you do to help people with various disabilities. It is so much more than that. This is true “design for all” where the people with different difficulties are the biggest winner. And on top of that, they use it as a competative advantage. That’s the spirit Dow Jones!

See Dow Jones press release below. / Niclas

Dow Jones Factiva Listen Capability Transforms the Way Users Consume News

Time-Saving Tool Enables Users to Perform Other Tasks While Listening to Relevant News
NEW YORK, (March 5, 2008) – Dow Jones & Company introduced a new “text-to-speech” capability in Dow Jones Factiva that allows users to listen to the news that drives their business. With one click, users can now listen to a news article rather than read it, freeing them to do other things and multitask as the pace of business today requires.

Currently available in beta format, a “Listen to Article” link appears at the top of any full-text article with fewer than 4,000 words. The listen capability is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages and automatically defaults to reading in the interface language previously selected by the user.

“Dow Jones Factiva continues to set itself apart from the competition by being the first to offer text-to-speech technology in the current awareness, news and research market,” said Dennis Cahill, senior vice president and chief product officer of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. “This new capability builds on our commitment to provide customers with relevant news when, where and how they need it and to reinforce our No. 1 position in the marketplace.”

The listen capability is a Web-based service provided by VoiceCorp (www.voice-corp.com) that converts text into speech on the fly. It is made available wherever full-text articles are found, including alerts, search results and newsletters. Once the link is clicked, the listen capability uses a Flash player to read the article.

The addition of text-to-speech further builds on Dow Jones’s goal of integrating various forms of multimedia content into Dow Jones Factiva. In August 2007, Dow Jones Factiva added highly relevant video and audio information including business news, CEO interviews, executive speeches, shareholders meetings, product reviews and other meaningful business content. Dow Jones Factiva searches across more than 14,000 authoritative sources, including the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires.