The ReadSpeaker Blog

Amazon State goes vocal

roylindemann — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:04:42 +0000

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.

ReadSpeaker with synchronized highlighting

niclasbergstrom — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:45:31 +0000

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.

From birth of the talking web and into the future (part 1)

niclasbergstrom — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:39:54 +0000

We have been in the business of speech-enabling web sites since 1999, date at which I had the idea to bring text-to-speech into the arena of web sites. What was my motivation for doing so? I realised that a certain number of people around me had problems or felt uncomfortable reading text found on web sites. Sure, screen readers were already around and TTS had been built into operating systems but these options were simply not used by these users who I questioned hard about how they would like web sites to function. On the other side I thought to myself that for a web site owner it would be a useful feature to help users get an easier and free access to the audio version of their content without having to take care and worry about developing, installing, maintaining and updating this themselves. The combination of those 2 findings gave birth to ReadSpeaker which was commercially launched in Sweden back in 2001.

At the beginning I had a very focused idea of which web site owners this would appeal to. I started approaching the public sector as well as web sites that were aimed at disability groups. At the beginning the end users who I thought about were mainly people who suffered from dyslexia and other various reading disabilities. Then a strange thing happened. I started getting feedback from users that I had not even thought of would use ReadSpeaker. These were senior citizens who appreciated the comfort of having the choice between reading or listening the text content of web sites. These were foreigners living in Sweden who liked to be able to listen to Swedish instead of reading it. These were students who could listen to lessons by saving the mp3 file to their mobile devices. These were “information workers” who in their fast paced environments needed to listen to web content while taking care of other tasks at the same time. These were….well you got me, the circle of users kept and keeps on getting bigger and bigger. This trend also had an effect on the customers that we started approaching and that were also increasingly contacting us. From the narrower group of public and disability web sites, we started implementing ReadSpeaker on a greater variety of areas like the banking sector, the insurance companies, transport organisations, online media, etc.

What happened next was very interesting, but more on that in another (soon to come) post

Google Knol - now with text-to-speech

niclasbergstrom — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:22:54 +0000

A few days ago Google announced that they begin to experiment with text-to-speech on their “Knol”.

Quote from their site: “We are experimenting with Audio Playback as an option for some knols, starting with a handful of English language featured knols. You can listen using our Flash player, or by downloading an mp3 file and using any mp3 player.”

If a listen-button is shown next to the “print” and “share” button, you know that the Knol is available also as audio.

Read all about it and try it out here: http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/knol-audio-playback/

Listen function as Universal design

niclasbergstrom — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:14:46 +0000

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.

There are many people that are helped by speech function integrated on a website. I would dare to say that being able to listen to a web page is Universal Design.

The last years more and more websites subscribe to our ReadSpeaker services that speech enable the websites for anyone that rather listens than reads. We are currently working very hard to make the services more usable in any kind of situation, and regardless of what device you happen to use. It is both a question of usability and mobile user experience. ReadSpeaker is in itself completely device independent since it is a server side service, and we are now finalizing our new implementation instructions that will ensure that it works on any computer, handheld, mobile phone and whatever device that could possibly have a web browser installed. The amount of people using the mobile phone to browse the Internet is increasing dramatically and within the next 2-3 years analysts expect that almost 3 billion people will have web access through their mobile phones. It is time to get ready for this. First, to create websites that work in all these devices and also, since we would probably not see any 17 inch displays on these, speech enable the sites. For everybody that rather listens than reads.

VoiceCorp at VocalExpo

roylindemann — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:35:52 +0000

We have a stand this Thursday at the 3rd edition of Vocal Expo, the main trade show for vocal technologies in France. As you can hear, we also speech-enable the Vocal Expo web site itself and I will be presenting a session about the reasons for speech-enabling a web site at 15h30.

The Target Store case

roylindemann — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:28:11 +0000

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.

Web2.0 Expo Top 5

niclasbergstrom — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 06:13:00 +0000

The top 5 things about attending the Web2.0 conference

Networking
More networking
Inspiration
Getting up to date with the development around the world
The parties!

Time to go again. I am attending the Web2.0 Expo in New York together with my colleague and co-blogger Mr. Roy Lindemann. If you want to meet any of us for a chat, please get in touch!

European commission urges on web accessibility

DanielE — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 18:59:48 +0000

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:

The Official San Francisco Website, now talking to you!

niclasbergstrom — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:38:00 +0000

VoiceCorp has done it again! The official website for the City of San Francisco is one of the latest web sites to make their content more accessible by adding the ReadSpeaker read-aloud text-to-speech service to their web pages. Most of the pages on the website now have a ”Listen” button in the tool bar right next to the ”Print”, ”Text Only” and ”Font size” functions. Listen for yourself at http://www.sfgov.org/site/mayor_index.asp