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