We have decided to sponsor the European Accessibility Forum held on the 27th of March in Frankfurt Germany.

Web accessibility is of great importance not only for people using screen readers and other assistive technology but also for everybody else. Adopting and practicing the web standards is key to make web content accessible for more people regardless of device, browser type and operation system.

When I attended and spoke at the CSUN Conference on Disability 2009 in Los Angeles last week I had the opportunity to talk to the authors of the WCAG 2. I was glad to see that speech enabling is finally seen as enhanced accessibility, especially to make the text content more understandable. So in short; implementing a ReadSpeaker service on your website can help you to conform to some of the guidelines.

If you are attending the European Accessibility Forum in Frankfurt and would like to meet up with me, please contact info@voice-corp.com to set up a meeting.

See the Conference website for more information about the conference: http://eafra.eu/

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.

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/

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