In our Q&A series, we are very pleased to have had some time to discuss with Bert Zahniser, Vice-President of Technology of the American Institute of History Education, and Laureen Hungo-Brady, Instructional Design and Curriculum Editor of CICERO Kids™ .

The American Institute for History Education’s (AIHE) mission is to provide substantive, engaging historical content and activities for teachers to use in their classrooms that will dramatically increase students’ comprehension of historical events, personalities, issues, and trends. The American Institute for History Education was founded to provide history teachers with high quality professional development programs, firmly anchored in rich historical content, along with substantive historical lessons, activities, and resources to use in their classrooms.

AIHE recently launched CICERO Kids™ which is a convenient and cost-effective, anytime classroom tool that is comprised of five online units (sold separately or in modules). Each unit is a complete and comprehensive program designed modularly so that it may be added to other units to expand the series. An interactive museum is the setting for students in Pre-K through 5th grade to learn about American history and social studies from the first explorers to the early 20th Century. CICERO Kids™ lets students explore a great lobby and meet a cast of interactive characters who are waiting to share their “Did you Know” facts.

Since CICERO Kids™ lessons are available on a subscription basis, they created a special demo page where you can see and listen to ReadSpeaker in action.

Roy Lindemann (ReadSpeaker): Why did you add ReadSpeaker to your CICERO Kids website?

Laureen Hungo-Brady (AIHE): I’ll discuss the educational reasons first and then hand over to Bert. There are 2 reasons for which we believe ReadSpeaker is a useful tool for the children who use our site. We have a wide range of students from pre-kindergarten to 5th grade with different levels of reading comprehension going from non-readers to more advanced readers. The children use our website with the help of teachers and at other times by themselves. With the help of ReadSpeaker’s listen button, all children can now listen actively to the different text contents we have in our interactive musuem. ReadSpeaker provides the right breadth so that all our students can use it easily. The second reason is that ReadSpeaker helps struggling readers validate what they are reading. The dynamic conversion of text into high quality speech enables these readers to hear if they are reading the text correctly from a phonetic point of view.  The synchronized highlighting of the words as they are being read enables a better comprehension of the written content. This helps empower non readers, beginner and struggling readers as well as students with English as a second language.

Bert Zahniser (AIHE): From a technical point of view, the 2 fundamental reasons that made us choose ReadSpeaker are the synchronized highlighting of the words being read and the quality of the text to speech voices. We also like the various voices that are available.

Laureen Hungo-Brady: Can I add that another reason of importance in adding ReadSpeaker, is the current focus on literacy, in conjunction with the National Common Core Standards. The synchronized highlighting as the text is being converted to speech improves literacy by helping the eye track the words that are being spoken thereby associating sound and meaning.

Roy Lindemann: What has the feedback been so far?

Laureen Hungo-Brady: It’s been absolutely great. Teachers really see the value in the highlighting and tracking of the words as they are being speech-enabled.

Roy Lindemann: How easy has it been to add ReadSpeaker to the CICERO Kids website?

Bert Zahniser: It went very smoothly. We implemented ReadSpeaker on our development, staging and production sites and it worked nicely from the start. We got good support from your technical team to deal with the sign-in aspect of our site. Our pages were speech-enabled in a couple of hours and it took only about 2 weeks to fully test and fine-tune aspects of the player such as the look and the positioning until we were ready to release to the public.

Roy Lindemann: How did ReadSpeaker cope with the pronunciation of your written content?

Bert Zahniser: We were pleasantly surprised how accurately ReadSpeaker interpreted the pronunciation of our content including names. As a history provider, we have lots of names of people and places that can be hard to pronounce.  I expected quite a few pronunciation issues but thus far have had only a couple that we needed to have corrected.

Roy Lindemann: To what type of content owners would you recommend our service?

Laureen Hungo-Brady and Bert Zahniser: Any website that targets struggling readers, beginning readers or language learners would greatly benefit from adding a service like yours.

Recently I visited some of our clients  in Australia. We had several meetings with existing long term clients and some engaging sessions with new prospects. It is clear that accessibility is high on the agenda of the Australian public. There is a major effort to implement WCAG2.0 and the knowledge level of the Australian webmasters about the topic is impressive. A few things were striking during the long meetings that we had; online text to speech is an excellent tool to help the accessibility of a website, and most of our existing and new clients understand that and see that as one of the reasons to implement ReadSpeaker on their website. The usage statistics for the ReadSpeaker services are excellent and I was pleased to see such a large group of keen ambassadors of our solutions.

During the meetings, we discovered another striking new way of using ReadSpeaker for accessibility purposes. A way that we had not envisaged before. In several of our meetings with the Australian Federal government departments, it became clear that many of the PDF and Word documents that are displayed on the government’s website are not accessible. They have been produced in times when accessibility was not an important attribute. Lay-out and design took the forefront. This has created a major task for government institutions, as all information needs to be accessible by year end 2012. Some of the more innovative departments have been using our ReadSpeaker docReader tool on their websites to read PDF documents. The perfect reading of these documents depends on their level of accessibility;  the better they are tagged, the better they are read.

This fact has led some departments to use ReadSpeaker in a slightly different way. It has become a gate keeper to test a document on its accessibility before it is published on a website. When someone wants to publish a document (from inside the department or from an external agency), ReadSpeaker docReader is now being implemented as a checker on the staging/testing server. Any PDF, ODF, Word document can be checked on its correct accessibility tagging by running it through the docReader tool. If it reads correctly, it is correctly tagged. This proves to be a great help for the creators of the content. In many cases these are external agencies that create these documents for the Federal government. Our clients have found an interesting way to use the ReadSpeaker products to help them test the accessibility of their own content. That is probably one of the best proofs of the alignment of ReadSpeaker to the online accessibility goals of WCAG2.0.

While I was in Australia, Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, launched the National Year of Reading. Australia is facing 4.5M people with literacy issues. That is a stunning 20% of the 22M population in Australia. These percentage numbers are similar in other developed countries across the globe. The ReadSpeaker technology offers a great help for these struggling readers, not only by assisting them to read and understand the content of the online texts, but also by helping them to learn to read better. Our technology of synchronized text highlighting while listening offers the capability to learn to read better over time.

Those are the words of the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in a speech given to launch the National Year of Reading campaign on February 14. About 4.5 million working-age adults Australians do not have the necessary higher reading and numeracy skills to succeed in work or study, Ms Gillard said. According to the The National Year of Reading 2012 project, nearly half the Australian population struggles without the literacy skills to meet the most basic demands of everyday life and work. There are 46% of Australians who can’t read newspapers; follow a recipe; make sense of timetables, or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle. This is just the latest statistical example of how illiteracy is affecting countries in all parts of the globe.

According to the UNESCO, 793 million adults suffer from illiteracy in the world. Over half of the adult population of Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Haiti, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Sierra Leone are illiterate. 21% of women in the world are illiterate.

In France, 9% of the adult population suffers from functional illiteracy. Over half of the people who are functionally illiterate in France have a job.

In the United States, a study by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, showed that 22% of adults were below basic in quantitative literacy in 2003 (indicating they possess no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills). 63 million adults - 29% of the United States adult population – over age 16 don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level. An additional 30 million - 14 % of the country’s adult population – can only read at a fifth grade level or lower.

We’re asked all the time if we prerecord audio and play it back when the user clicks the Listen button. Some people even ask if we then keep these recordings available on our server. The answers are no and no. All speech is generated on the fly from your latest content.

The most explicit example of this concept can be seen on media and news websites and mobile apps where content may be added or updated several times a day, hour, or minute.

Why should you add online text to speech to media and news sites or mobile apps?

• It increases the accessibility of your news content for your current readership and attracts new users who appreciate the choice to read or listen to your online content.
• Your content becomes mobile. Giving your mobile users the ability to listen to your news while on the go is a very useful way to deliver content to them.
• You can provide your advertisers with a new audio- and/or banner-based advertising space focused on users who enjoy audio content.
• It enables automatic redistribution of your written content in audio format.
• Multitaskers appreciate being able to do other things while listening to the news.

What about live coverage? Why should you add online text to speech to live coverage, such as news, sporting events, stocks, tweets, etc.?
The internet is a real-time medium, with more and more content added or updated faster and faster. ReadSpeaker converts live coverage of all types of news into speech on the fly enabling your users to listen to the most up-to-date news and information.

Have a media/news site or mobile app? Contact us to make it talk!

Adding speech as a service to a website, mobile site or app, is a decision that the content owner takes for several reasons such as:

• A new and easy way for their users to access online content
• An innovative way to interact with online text content
• Enhanced usability
• An easier access to text content for users with reading disabilities
• Corporate social responsibility
• Reaching out to a greater number of users
• Delivering audio information to multiple platforms and devices

Usage will vary depending on who the content owner targets, how the service is implemented and communicated about. In terms of implementation, many different parameters can be modified such as what part of the content should be read, the design and placement of the player, the speed, pitch, volume and order of reading, if the text should be highlighted while it is being read, and more. Content owners find it useful to be able to customize how they want the audio version of their online text to be played out.

Let us know what you are looking for when considering speech as a service for your online content.

Mention the digital divide, and most people think it’s all about those with access to computers and the internet and those without. Traditionally, the difference lies between developed countries and undeveloped countries. Within some countries, this divide exists further between urban and rural areas. As time passes and resources and infrastructure change, this divide is reduced. But there are other digital divides that most of us ignore completely or are not even aware exist.

Disabilities - There still exists a huge divide between people without disabilities and those with disabilities in terms of computer and peripheral usability and online accessibility. Disabilities can range from visual impairment to learning disabilities to physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy.

Digital Literacy – Some people seem to have been born using computers and are able to do anything online, while other do so reluctantly because they lack the skills needed to successfully find their way around. Sometimes this difference can be attributed to a generational divide. Those born after 1980 have pretty much grown up with the internet, while older generations can still remember using typewriters and having no other way to communicate than calling someone (through a landline) or sending letters via the post office.

Devices – Another new digital divide is based on the type of device used to connect to the internet. More and more people use their smartphone or tablet to access the internet instead of a computer. It can be much easier and cheaper to buy a smartphone, thus reducing the more traditional digital divide within even undeveloped countries. Indeed, when there are iPads, iPhones, and Android smartphones/tablets everywhere, we laugh when a friend has only a basic mobile telephone to only call people or send text messages. But even when smart devices are prevalent, another divide comes from the price of accessing the internet. From country to country, there is a large disparity in data plan pricing.

Usage – Finally, there’s the divide in terms of usage. Some people cannot live without being connected, while others simply prefer not to go online if they don’t have to. There can also be a sense of isolation from too much online “living”. Some believe we are no longer connecting offline because we spend so much time online. There is no reason to even leave the house when you can order your groceries and manage your bank accounts online. The very act of going online can also be isolating. Outside of social media and forums, when you visit websites or use online applications, you’re interacting with no one.

There are probably other divides that exist or will arise in the future. As more and more governments, companies, and health care organizations move online, those on the wrong side of the divide should not be left behind.

It’s amazing how much text content gets created every day on the web. Think about all the blog posts, news articles and updates which generate billions of new text each day. Dynamic content brings about enormous volumes of text each second.

Now combine that with how much of this text content gets increasingly accessed from mobile devices. According to Comscore’s report, half of the total U.S. mobile population uses mobile media. The mobile media user population (those who browse the mobile web, access applications, or download content) grew 19 percent in the past year to more than 116 million people at the end of August 2011.

The problems with reading text from mobile devices for users are that:

• They can’t engage in other activities or tasks while reading
• They might have reading disabilities that keep them from accessing the written content
• The level of comfort offered by smaller screens is not always adequate

Having an online text to speech feature solves those problems and enables content owners to distribute their text on the fly into audio. The speech-enabling of the content that is displayed on mobile devices also increases the value of the text since it has both a written and audio output.

Contact us if you want to find out more about how you can unmute your online text content.

The BovenIJ hospital is a general basic hospital based in Amsterdam North. One of the things that makes BovenIJ a nice hospital is its personal attention to each patient. BovenIJ hospital was the first Dutch care institution. In order to provide better services for its international patients and visitors, BovenIJ publishes its website in four languages: Dutch, English, Turkish, and Arabic. We recently interviewed Angelina Hammond of the BovenIJ  Communications Department on how the hospital benefits from ReadSpeaker online text-to-speech solutions.

Q. Why did you decide to speech-enable your website?
A. Our hospital deals with patients of different cultures. The district in which we are situated is also very multicultural. It’s no more than a logical decision to give the information in different languages, but also make it available for the illiterate. Our Consumers’ Consultative Council, which we call ‘Cliëntenraad’, also played an important part in the final decision to speech-enable our website.

Q. How did you learn about ReadSpeaker and its solutions?
A. One colleague did a lot research on Internet, so she came across this application and its solutions.

Q. How much effort was involved to add ReadSpeaker to your website?
A. We needed some support to add ReadSpeaker. Of course, this was also a special case because it involved four different languages.

Q. How have you benefited from having a talking website?
A. We have been able to provide extra service to the outside world. We’ve received many compliments about this service.

Q. How satisfied are your website visitors with the ReadSpeaker listen feature?
A. Very satisfied!

Q. Would you recommend other hospitals to add ReadSpeaker to their website?
A. Yes, absolutely.

Q. Do you have any additional feedback about ReadSpeaker?
A. Every organization or firm should have such a tool to reach even more clients or different sections of the public.

Amongst the number of customization possibilities offered by ReadSpeaker online text to speech solutions, the ability to switch languages and/or voices can be useful in a number of situations:

• Some websites mix different languages within a same page.
• In some cases, you might want to distinguish a quote from the rest of the text in your web page by allocating a different voice to speech-enable the quote.
• You have a web page where both genders are quoted and therefore need to have female and male voices.
• A combination of the above points.

You can test our automatic language switch demo and our automatic voice switch demo to see how this works.

Contact us if you want a free online text to speech demo of how these automatic voice and language switches work on your own web site.