Read Speaker

A server-based prod­uct that reads the text on a web­site and requires no plu­gin. It also reads Word, RTF and PDF doc­u­ments. You can try the ser­vice out by click­ing on the ‘SayIt’ bot­ton on the Read­Speaker site. From their website:

The Mis­sion of Read­Speaker is to make the “mir­a­cle of the Inter­net” acces­si­ble for dyslex­ics, peo­ple with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, low lit­er­acy level, peo­ple with Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage, elderly with impaired vision and oth­ers that like to lis­ten as well as read.

I’m not quite sold on their claim that “Read­Speaker will make your web­site acces­si­ble for more peo­ple than any other acces­si­bil­ity mea­sure­ment that you put in place,” but I don’t sup­pose it could hurt. For­tu­nately they do rec­om­mend that you fol­low the W3C/WAI guide­lines as well. I couldn’t find any pric­ing infor­ma­tion, but you can con­tact them for a free trial and price quote

Read­Speaker

Disability, Accessibility and Alternative Format Symbols

I’ve recently been look­ing for a stan­dard set of icons to rep­re­sent mate­ri­als avail­able in alter­nate for­mats. I didn’t find much, here are a cou­ple that I came across:

• Sense, a UK Deaf­blind Char­ity has a set of sym­bols that they use on their site.
• The Graph­ics Artists Guild has cre­ated a set of twelve dis­abil­ity access sym­bols that are avail­able to any­one to indi­cate the avail­abil­ity of acces­si­ble ser­vices. The sym­bols are avail­able for down­load in TIFF for­mat. If you do a search for “dis­abil­ity access sym­bols”, you’ll pri­mar­ily get a bunch of lists of these icons.

Assum­ing that there must be more than these two resources, I started explor­ing dis­abil­ity iconog­ra­phy in gen­eral. A while back, Scott from Rolling Rains was was asked, “Is there an inter­na­tional stan­dard that is used in the iconog­ra­phy depict­ing peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties?” Scott replied:

Unfor­tu­nately, the answer is, ‘No.’

It may be arguable that the stan­dard per­son in the wheel­chair sym­bol is inter­na­tional in scope, but even if it is there are many good argu­ments that it is not a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of dis­abil­i­ties in general.

The need for bet­ter acces­si­bil­ity sym­bols is defin­i­tively laid out in a Sym­bol­iz­ing Acces­si­bil­ity arti­cle from Joe Clark wherein he cri­tiques some of the cur­rent sym­bols and pro­vides some sug­ges­tions on what is needed. In addi­tion, Joe worked with Melanie Goux to develop an improved sym­bol for audio descrip­tion and wrote about the process.

Is there any­thing bet­ter out there… any­where? If so, please leave a note in the com­ments. If not, are there any ambi­tious graphic design­ers out there?

Fur­ther Reading:

• Thoughts on the Inter­na­tional Access Sym­bol “Yeah, even though I’m a chair user, I have a prob­lem with the access sym­bol. It dis­en­fran­chises many of my friends who live with dis­abil­i­ties but who do not use chairs.”
• Dis­cus­sion of the Wheel­chair sym­bol from the Acces­sify forums “I’d be inter­ested to know what other’s feel­ings are on this and open to sug­ges­tions of an alter­na­tive sym­bol that would deliver the same mes­sage?” (regard­ing the wheel­chair icon)

For more infor­ma­tion on alter­nate for­mats, see
User-Friendly Mate­ri­als and Alter­nate For­mats from the National Cen­ter for the Dis­sem­i­na­tion of Dis­abil­ity Research.