The Spanish National Library just added online text to speech to its online documents. This follows the speech-enabling of its website last October. This is the latest example of how content owners are increasingly looking to customize how they want speech to interact with online text.

The first step is usually for content owners to add speech to their  websites. This can be customized in different ways like:

• What part(s) of a web page should be read
• Adding multiple listen buttons to a web page
• Adding multiple audio versions in terms of languages and voices
• Setting the default speed and pitch of the voice
• Specific pronunciation of certain words
• Design and placement of the audio player
• Rules for how images, tables, links should be read

This is customization at the web page level. Then content owners, like the Spanish National Library, also want to go deeper and provide their users with an audio access to online documents. Document formats like PDF have their own structure and we provide a specific reading and viewing solution to that effect.

Another aspect of customization involves the speech-enabling of forms. This provides end users with a voice service helping them to fill out online forms.

Customers can now adapt how they want online speech services to be integrated to their content.

I attended some weeks ago the 4th European eAccessibility Forum organised by BrailleNet. BrailleNet have just published the proceedings. The conference was of very high quality and I particularly enjoyed the hands-on experiences of some speakers on the challenges of maintaining accessibility standards on their web sites. You can also listen to the proceedings thanks to our ReadSpeaker docReader product in action.

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 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.