The World Usability Day is taking place this year on November 11. We are proud to be part of this initiative by providing our online text to speech listen feature for the web site.  Making our online text to speech services as usable as possible has always been a strong objective since we first started developing solutions for users to have the choice of listening to web sites.

According to Usability.gov’s definition of usability;

Usability measures the quality of a user’s experience when interacting with a product or system-whether a Web site, a software application, mobile technology, or any user-operated device.

Several criteria are listed to measure the degree of usability:

• Ease of learning – How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
• Efficiency of use – Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks?
• Memorability – If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start over again learning everything?
• Error frequency and severity – How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
• Subjective satisfaction – How much does the user like using the system?

Let’s look at how ReadSpeaker products face up to these different factors:

• Ease of learning – We give a lot of importance to how quickly end users should understand what a ReadSpeaker product is about. We provide our customers with best practices on how to implement our Listen buttons so that it is immediately clear to the visitor of the web site what ReadSpeaker should deliver when it is activated. No training is needed to use ReadSpeaker which facilitates the learning process.
• Efficiency of use – Since there is no learning/training involved to use a ReadSpeaker product, the task is accomplished immediately by clicking on our Listen button. Moreover, our products are always designed to be of “click and listen” nature. When you click on the Listen button on any given web site which uses our products, the sound starts in a fraction of time without any additional steps needed to activate the audio.
• Memorability – Since there is an immediate association between our Listen buttons and the task that they perform, there is no need to memorize the attributes of our products to make them work.
• Error frequency and severity – Using our services is straightforward. I would instead discuss here the potential problems encountered when a user doesn’t have Flash installed and/or Javascipt enabled when trying to listen to a web page. We always ensure that there is a direct link to a sound file so that all users can have access to the speech-enabled version of the web page.
• Subjective satisfaction – The living proof here is the millions of hits we get each month from users that rely on our services or enjoy using them. We have thousands of customers globally – from Oman to Singapour, from Brazil to the Faroe Islands, from Switzerland to the US, that use our services recurrently to help their end users better understand what they have to say.

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.