Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility from A List Apart 4.0

As men­tioned all around the horn tonight A List Apart is back with a new design and a great new arti­cle from Joe Clark appro­pri­ately called Facts and Opin­ions About PDF Acces­si­bil­ity.

Towards the begin­ning of the arti­cle he sets the first point of his summary:

Most PDFs on the web should be HTML

How­ever, he then lists 14 instances where PDF may well be the appro­pri­ate file for­mat. The arti­cle also goes on to debunk some pop­u­lar myths sur­round­ing PDF, explains how they can be made more acces­si­ble and an infor­ma­tive overview of how PDF files are han­dled by three pop­u­lar screen read­ers (JAWS, Window-Eyes and Home Page Reader). Also, don’t miss out on the dis­cus­sion.

Text to Speech Software and Voices

I’m try­ing under­stand a lit­tle more about Text to Speech tech­nolo­gies, and and came across a cou­ple of help­ful links: a Speech syn­the­sis page from Wikipedia and a Text-to-Speech page at SNOW. It appears there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent text to speech soft­ware pack­ages avail­able.

The issue seems to be fur­ther com­pli­cated in that at least some of the software/voice pack­ages appear to require a license based on how many times a user dis­trib­utes a voice recording.

My last con­cern is how to select a voice to use– it looks like a num­ber of dif­fer­ent options avail­able. To save you some time, if you are look­ing for IBM’s nat­ural voices the first page I came across was their AT&T Text to Speech Research Lab which took me to their offi­cial AT&T Nat­ural Voices page and from there to Wiz­zard Soft­ware where you can actu­ally pur­chase a prod­uct– although I still wasn’t sure exactly what…

Any­ways, I am look­ing for some help on this one– does any­one know of any good resources, have a favorite piece of soft­ware of favorite voice? If not, I don’t know how updated this is, but it looks like a good place to start.

As a side­note, I wasn’t even aware of the W3C Speech Syn­the­sis Markup Lan­guage (SSML) — looks really interesting.

Evaluating Websites for Accessibility with Firefox

From the intro to the arti­cle:

Patrick H. Lauke out­lines how Mozilla Fire­fox can be used in con­junc­tion with the Web Devel­oper Tool­bar to carry out a pre­lim­i­nary acces­si­bil­ity review