VoiceCorp are happy to announce the release of a plug-in for ReadSpeaker Enterprise services for the WordPress publishing platform. More and more companies as well as media organizations use the WordPress platform to create websites and blogs. The platform is easy to use as well as it is easy to customize and maintain. With this new plug-in, the ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding Player is implemented in no time and with just the click of a few buttons. The plug-in adds a Listen-button to each blog post and enables the visitor to listen to each post/article. It works pretty much like the Listen function on this blog (which is also built on the WordPress platform). With ReadSpeaker Enterprise, the customer can also customize the user experience by having a selection of many different languages and voices.

As the initiators of the market for speech-enabling web sites with our ReadSpeaker products, we have come across many different reasons amongst our 3000+ customer web sites for giving their online text content a voice using our server side solution.  Here is a list of the 10 main reasons which come back most often from our customers :

1.    It helps certain users get better access to our web site, notably all those that have different reading handicaps such as dyslexia or a certain degree of visual impairment.
2.    It is a great comfort tool for users who spend long periods of time in front of their computer or mobile phone and who appreciate listening to a web page to ease the strain of reading text.
3.    It is a very easy way for listening to our text wherever our user is and whenever he/she wants to listen. Thanks to the save mp3 feature or the ability to convert RSS feeds into podcasts, our text content is portable to mobile devices like a smartphone or mp3 device.
4.    It is a learning tool that helps our web site visitors whose language is not the same we write our content in better understand by listening to it.
5.    We can reach out to more users, increase the trafic to our web site or blog and at the same time show that we care for those that benefit from listening instead of reading our online content.
6.    It helps our users in multi-task contexts listen to our content while engaging in other activities. This can range from listening to cooking recipes while in front of the stove, to listening to step by step do-it-yourself activities like putting up a new window.
7.    It provides us with the missing link, we can now have our users listen as well as sharing, printing, sending our content.
8.    It immediately and on-the-fly converts our online text content into voice thereby giving us an effortless audio channel that we can propose for free to our followers.
9.    Because of the server-side service proposed by ReadSpeaker, our content can be listened to from any device connected to the Internet, whether from home, at the work place or from any location with Internet connectivity.
10.    Since ReadSpeaker is device independent, we are sure that our visitors can listen to what we have to say whatever hardware they use, from a PC to an Android supported phone but also gaming consoles, interactive Internet-TV systems, Internet kiosks, etc

Following our PDF reading capability for ReadSpeaker proReader that we introduced on May 15, we are now very excited to announce the release of our new highly demanded “Embedded Highlighting” add-on for our ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding product. By simply clicking on the Listen button, the website user can see the synchronized highlighting of the text being read either on word by word and/or sentence basis. The user just needs to click on the settings link under the player to choose which highlighting option best suits his/her needs.

When a visitors first land on a web page with the Expanding player, this is what they typically see:

Listen button before it has been clicked on

Then, when the user clicks on the Listen button, the player appears and expands as follows:

Activated Listen button with expanded player

By then clicking on the Settings link, four synchronized highlighting options are available to the user:

Settings choices for synchronized highlighting

Here for example is how the synchronized highlighting looks when the “Word and Sentence” option has been chosen:

Synchronized highlighting of the text by word and sentence

Once the user has selected the synchronized highlighting of his/her choice, a cookie will enable the same setting when the user starts the ReadSpeaker Expaning Player service again.

We see the following advantages for web site owners who wish to propose this add-on to their visitors:

• Enhanced and better comprehension of the text being read out
• Immediate and exact vision on which part of the web page is being read out
• Choice of synchronized highlighting which best fits the user’s needs

And like with all our ReadSpeaker products, the user does not need to download and install special software to use our Expanding Player. In the case where the visitor uses a browser without support for Javascript and can’t play Flash content, we always make sure that the audio can be played so that the text can be read back.

Try the Embedded highlighting add-on now on our web site for example on the ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding page by clicking on the Listen button at the top of the page. Remember to click on the Settings link under the player to choose the highlighting option you want to activate.

We have gotten many requests from our different geographical markets and the various industries and services that we sell to regarding this add-on and have worked hard to make this happen. We are very enthusiastic on this new embedded highlighting feature and hope you enjoy it!

When we explain what ReadSpeaker can bring to online content owners, one of the main elements is ease of implementation and of use. Implementing our service on a web site or blog is analog to for example installing Google Analytics. You simply need to copy/paste HTML code to get your web site talking. On the user side, you just need to be connected to the Internet and off you go listening to a speech-enabled web site or blog.

I’m insisting on this facility of usage both from the content owner and user point of views because it brings me to the title of this post. When you refer to printing a web page, the first impression is that of how easy it is to perform such an action. The same could be said of other well distributed goodies such as sharing an article or sending a page. The real innovation we brought to the Internet back in 1999 was the ability to also “print” sound as easily as printing an online text. I must confess that I didn’t coin this impression of printing sound. That was the finding of a well-known tech blogger in France called Fred Cavazza who first discussed this concept in this post (in French).

Printing sound conveys a very appealing image to the ability to simply click on our listen buttons to start listening to the content of a web page. It also, as is the case with printing a page, shows that with ReadSpeaker you can also “carry” along the sound impression. This is the case because you can save the mp3 file of the page you are listening to for use at a later time or on a mobile device. I really like this comparison of ReadSpeaker to printing sound. I find these kind of images often speak for a thousand words.

So are you ready to print sound?

speechtechmag.com published an article from an interview with Roy Lindemann (VoiceCorp CIO) about the launch of the webReader today: Read the whole article here: http://www.speechtechmag.com/Articles/News/News-Feature/Web-Talk-on-the-Fly-52406.aspx

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.

Here at VoiceCorp we’re convinced and obsessed that all web site owners and bloggers benefit from adding an audio version to their online content. So far, we have had a lot of our customers coming from the public arena. That is quite normal since this sector has often the obligation to provide an equal access to their information whether you suffer from a disability or use a mobile device to reach their online content for example. Making their web sites talk helps them achieve this.

But what about the private corporate sector? We are starting to see an evolution here with an increasing amount of household names contacting us and asking us what speech-enabling their web sites could help them achieve. One of the interesting trends here is that some of these companies see an audio version of their web content as part of their overall corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since more and more of their corporate information is published online, these companies are considering the impact that this could have on all those customers, partners, employees that for some reason would prefer to listen to this information rather than reading it. The most recent example of this type of behaviour comes from a world-wide leading luxury and retail group which we are unfortunately not allowed to name. We asked them the straight forward question why they wanted to provide a speaking version of their web site? The answer was not only did they want to make their content as accessible as possible to a maximum amount of visitors to their web site but that this was also part of a bigger general reflection on how they were trying to increase their CSR in all the different aspects of their day-to-day operations. Of course, the more visible parts of a CSR strategy are for example to foster employee volunteering programs or taking part in environmental actions but it is noteworthy to see that the web is now also part of this overall reasoning. At the end of the day, CSR whether it is done offline or online is all about reaching beyond purely business objectives and making the world a better place to live in no?