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I just caught the last of Shawn Henry’s SXSW panel. Key takeway- there are white areas of things that are good to do for accessibility and black areas of things that are bad for accessibility- avoid worrying about the gray area in the middle. She mentioned the ability of web accessibility experts to endlessly debate […]

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Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have announced their participation in the Internet Captioning Forum (ICF) established to promote the use of captioning for online video. They will be working with the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH Boston. You can read quotes from Vint Cerf and other representatives from each of the big […]

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From the AT TechNET @ VCU: Assistive Technology Blog, a link to Communicate: Webwide, the first symbol-supported web browser. Everything happens in the browser where you can view pages in normal view, with plain text or using symbols. Their icon library contains over 29,000 words. It also reads any text that you highlight.
Is this type […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

Continue reading “Text to Speech Software and Voices” »

Skills for Access bills itself as The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Accessible Multimedia for e-learning. I haven’t had time to go all the way through the site, but it looks like it delivers with a lot of substantive content, complete with great case studies as well as in-depth instructions on how to create accessible multimedia […]

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Done by the same folks who are behind Speegle, the talking search engine, Speakwire is a free online tool that reads aloud a rss feed. From their press release:
Most people associate computer speech with visually impaired users. I think that is missing the point and we set out to demonstrate just how universal speech is. […]

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article from earlier this year on accessible pdf.

adobe just announced acrobat 7.0 with “advanced accessibility features”– see bottom of page 2 here. interesting stuff on canada’s accessibility requirements.

Continue reading “PDFs Redux” »

speegle.co.uk is a google like search engine that reads the results to you out loud. Not all that usefull, but a pretty good demo of this company’s technology.

Continue reading “Speegle Speaks” »