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.

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

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

Dow Jones have really understood what speech enabling is about. It is not just something you do to help people with various disabilities. It is so much more than that. This is true “design for all” where the people with different difficulties are the biggest winner. And on top of that, they use it as a competative advantage. That’s the spirit Dow Jones!

See Dow Jones press release below. / Niclas

Dow Jones Factiva Listen Capability Transforms the Way Users Consume News

Time-Saving Tool Enables Users to Perform Other Tasks While Listening to Relevant News
NEW YORK, (March 5, 2008) – Dow Jones & Company introduced a new “text-to-speech” capability in Dow Jones Factiva that allows users to listen to the news that drives their business. With one click, users can now listen to a news article rather than read it, freeing them to do other things and multitask as the pace of business today requires.

Currently available in beta format, a “Listen to Article” link appears at the top of any full-text article with fewer than 4,000 words. The listen capability is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages and automatically defaults to reading in the interface language previously selected by the user.

“Dow Jones Factiva continues to set itself apart from the competition by being the first to offer text-to-speech technology in the current awareness, news and research market,” said Dennis Cahill, senior vice president and chief product officer of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. “This new capability builds on our commitment to provide customers with relevant news when, where and how they need it and to reinforce our No. 1 position in the marketplace.”

The listen capability is a Web-based service provided by VoiceCorp (www.voice-corp.com) that converts text into speech on the fly. It is made available wherever full-text articles are found, including alerts, search results and newsletters. Once the link is clicked, the listen capability uses a Flash player to read the article.

The addition of text-to-speech further builds on Dow Jones’s goal of integrating various forms of multimedia content into Dow Jones Factiva. In August 2007, Dow Jones Factiva added highly relevant video and audio information including business news, CEO interviews, executive speeches, shareholders meetings, product reviews and other meaningful business content. Dow Jones Factiva searches across more than 14,000 authoritative sources, including the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires.