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.

We’ve just published a report that summarizes some of research-supported benefits of bimodal content presentation. Content is presented bimodally when it is in both audio and visual formats at the same time.  Bimodal reading refers to the act of reading text while hearing the words at the same time or reading the text, hearing the words, and having the words (and/or sentences) highlighted at the same time.

ReadSpeaker online text-to-speech solutions make it easy to present your online content bimodally. The end-user needs only to click the Listen button to hear the text while he reads it. Our products can also highlight the text at the same time either word by word or sentence by sentence.

The research shows that using text to speech can improve the end-user’s

• word recognition skills and vocabulary
• reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and concentration
• information recall and learning/memory enhancement

When using text to speech, the end-user can also feel more motivated and have a more positive attitude with regard to reading.

Download the report or get a demo of your own site presented bimodally.

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.

In the past months we have been adding speech to the online courses of a number of players in the e-learning space. Here are 5 benefits for e-learning organizations that want to add online text to speech to their educational content:

1. Increase the accessibility of online content for students with cognitive issues, learning disabilities, and vision problems, as well as students whose native language is not the language of the e-learning content.
2. Offer dual-mode content delivery (simultaneous text highlighting while it is read), which increases student retention,comprehension, and memory.
3. Foster academic achievement by letting students customize course delivery to their individual learning styles.
4. Enabling learners to listen to specific educational material such as math courses and online math content.
5. Provide multitasking opportunities for students and portability of content to other devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

How do you make your online courses available to a maximum number of students? Contact us to find out how we can help you add speech to your course material.

Photo Credit: algogenius

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.

Although text-to-speech technology has made a lot of progress, it can sometimes stumble on certain terms such as acronyms, abbreviations, date formats or number representations to name a few. We have some customers where the pronunciation needs fine-tuning such as in the pharmaceutical sector for example where it is even more important that each term is perfectly well read.

Every account that we open comes with a specific dictionary for the customer. We provide a service to each of our customers that helps them with pronunciation issues when they exist. Some of the pronunciation corrections will only be relevant to the dictionary of a particular customer, but in some instances the corrections can also be used for the default dictionary and benefit our entire customer base. We have a very knowledgeable network of linguists that can help our customers in many parts of the world when they encounter pronunciation difficulties.

We have prepared a few online text to speech demos that show the before and after effect of our work on some types of words that can get mispronounced by speech synthesis.

Photo Credit: Jim Linwood

Posted by Teresa Citro, CEO Learning Disabilities Worldwide (LDW)

The team at ReadSpeaker kindly offered me to present what we do at LDW. Learning Disabilities Worldwide, established in 1965, is an international professional organization dedicated to improving the educational, professional, and personal outcomes for individuals with learning disabilities (LD) and other related disorders. Our members include world-renowned experts and scholars, preservice teachers, general education teachers, special education teachers, paraprofessionals, team coaches, clinicians, consultants, administrators, medical and mental health professionals, individuals with learning disabilities, and their parents and families.

Learning Disabilities Worldwide publishes two peer-reviewed, scientifically-based journals that are multidisciplinary in nature focusing on empirical studies, reviews of the literature, policy issues, and advocacy relevant to the field of learning disabilities. We continue to engage in the professional development and dissemination of scholarly works and evidence-based practices to promote and enhance the success of all individuals with learning disabilities. We provide a unique opportunity for academic scholars, both in the United States and abroad, to exchange ideas and research opportunities to better the quality of life for individuals with learning disabilities around the world. We also work to enhance the lives of individuals with learning disabilities and their families through its publications, website, and conferences.

We are always looking for new and useful ways to make our online content as easy to access as possible and that is how we found ReadSpeaker’s text to speech online service. Our website, www.ldworldwide.org, uses ReadSpeaker Embedded Highlighting in English and 10 additional languages as well as ReadSpeaker docReader, so that our users may access our web pages and online documents through visual and auditory means. By providing this service, our website becomes more accessible and usable to those with disabilities. Through this service, ReadSpeaker helps Learning Disabilities Worldwide improve the lives of individuals with learning disabilities, their families, and the professionals in their lives.