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.

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