As you might have remembered when I wrote a post about From birth of the talking web and into the future. I owed you a follow-up note so here it is! As I had discussed, we started out by having a focused approach on which customers we should approach and which end-users would most benefit from a server-side speech-enabling solution for web sites. On the user side we have seen that the usages of our technology have increased over the past years making it appealing to a greater number of users. On the customer side, we also witnessed a greater variety of sectors interested in speech-enabling their web content ranging from public sites to banks, insurance companies, non-profit organisations and many others.
 
Now over the past months another change happened. We started getting an increasing amount of incoming leads from much smaller web sites and blogs also interested in speech-enabling their content. This could range from the mom and pop store with a web site to the blogger interested in space technology. These are typically 1 to 10 people organisations. Some of them are purely personal initiatives ie someone interested in a hobby while others might be freelancers, consultants, designers or any other small company or non-profit organisation. Since our company is set up to deal with mid-sized and bigger organisations we needed to see how we could propose an easy way for all these smaller web sites and blogs to speech-enable their content. The idea here was to really get a grasp on the essential features that matter to this segment and not throw in all the bells and whistles that serve no purpose at all. Then we thought how to make the implementation process as easy as possible so that all these new small customers could simply integrate our solution as a no-brainer either by using plug-ins we have developed for some popular CMS and blog platforms or either as a simple copy & paste of our HTML code directly into the source code of the page. The last point was to create a new web shop where both personal web sites and blogs as well as small companies and organisations could easily choose the most suitable package for their needs, sign-up and subscribe as seamlessly as possible.
 
We are now proud to announce that we are ready to launch this new venture! Our new product for this segment is called webReader and you can find out all about it by going to www.readspeaker.com. We hope you will enjoy this new service and find it useful and we will dedicate our maximum attention to support you in the best way possible. We are starting off with American and British English, Swedish and French voices and will be adding more very shortly.

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 the past couple of months we have been getting an increasing number of requests from smaller personal or business web sites and blogs that are interested in speech-enabling their web content using the award winning ReadSpeaker text-to-speech services, but that we just simply could not dedicate enough time to present and sell our applications to. To meet their needs we have decided to open up a dedicated web shop in the next coming days and sell our new application called webReader at either affordable monthly or yearly rates or for a free ad-financed version.

Please stay tuned as we will announce the launch on the blog soon now.

If you want to be contacted as soon as webReader is available, please register at http://www.rspeak.com/wr_signup/

We have been contacted a few weeks ago by a Brazilian web agency by the name of Vortex Midia headed by Wagner Cardoso about the possibility of speech-enabling several web sites belonging to the government authorities of the Amazon State in Brazil. We were very enthusiastic about this project because it shows just how speech-enabling the Internet is crossing geographical barriers. The main motivation for the Amazon State to speech-enable the thirty or so sites belonging to their portal is to provide an audio access to all the users of the portal who have some form of reading disability. The launch of the vocal version of the sites was of great interest to the numerous media who attended the Amazon State Governor’s press conference event. The Amazon State is pioneering web based speech services in Brazil and we are confident that this exemplary show case will lead to other such initiatives to help users access public information in other parts of the world as well.

Finally! proReader has arrived – the superior reading experience! No download required!

ReadSpeaker “proReader”; the next generation accessibility tool to make websites speak has arrived. We have for many years been asked to add the function of highlighting the text that is currently read. There was no simple way to do that on a server-side solution. There are always options to create programs that the users could install and run, but that wouldn’t really be a service that the website offered would it? After over one year of focused R & D we finally came up with a solution, and after a couple of months of user group testing and studies, we are now ready to launch: The proReader!ProReader is a packaged solution for medium size customers that want to make the text content on their websites as accessible as possible for people with special needs.

Customize the reading experience

The unique thing with proReader is that it is very easy to use for the ones that just want to listen, but it also gives many options to the user when it comes to customizing the reading experience. The user can choose to have the reading in different speeds, choose if the text should be highlighted dynamically as it is being read (per word/sentence or both), choose font, text size, colors and more…

Reading to everyone

As always when we design a ReadSpeaker service, we have made sure that the speech function is available for everyone and everywhere. This is regardless of what web browser is used and what client side scripting the user has available in his browser. All thanks to the server side technology. To use the basic functionality of proReader, all that is required is a (any) web browser running on a device that can play back mp3 audio. Including many mobile devices (however most mobile devices will only support the playback by selecting the “download mp” link).Creating a user interface that is rich with features and at the same time is easy to use requires a lot of research and user group testing. The initial responses during our beta testing period have been good, and we are already beginning to collect suggestions and wishes for the next version.

Intelligence of the masses

With proReader, which shows its user interface in a new window, the user has the possibility of sending feedback and report words that are not pronounced correctly so that our computer linguists can further improve the quality of the reading. Thanks to the ReadSpeaker general pronunciation dictionaries which are shared by all customers, everybody will benefit from the new pronunciation fixes. With the support of the mass intelligence out there, linguists can focus more on solving issues rather than search from them. The winners in the end are the users, which can experience a better sounding reading.

The other day I was standing in the hotel bar watching the TV. The volume was turned down completely but thanks to the real-time captioning I was able to follow the news broadcast. The day after, I was spending some hours waiting for my delayed flight at Heathrow airport to get ready for departure. There was a TV on the waiting area, again with the volume turned down. This time there was no captioning. However, they did have a sign-language narrator in the bottom right corner of the screen. That didn’t help me much since I can’t understand sign language. I was experience “Situational Disability”. In this case, text would have helped everybody that could read.Now, what about Audio? There are a great number of reasons why audio version of the text is as universal as text version of audio. Take reading a news article as an example. It is fairly difficult (not to say dangerous) to read today’s edition of the International Herald Tribune when driving a car. Text just simply doesn’t do very well in that situation. Reading it on a small mobile display is also not the best way to consume the article. If you have some kind of disability that makes it difficult to read ANY text you are in about the same situation. The fact that we want to consume written text in a situation when that is not possible (or convenient) somehow makes us all disabled. It is the situation that creates the handicap, not necessarily our abilities.

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

If you have a minute, please read this great article from “Insurance & Technology” about one of our recent ReadSpeaker implementations. / Niclas

Found this really good post about improving website performance

http://www.insidecrm.com/features/webmaster-turbo-kit-042108/

Read, Learn, Execute!