Using Symbols to Access the Web

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 of tech­nol­ogy the answer for some users with cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties? What about a poten­tial user who can’t access your mate­r­ial even when you have gone great lengths to sim­plify your writ­ing. Also, while indi­vid­ual sites may pro­vide their own visual ele­ments to rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent ideas, is their value is hav­ing a stan­dard set of icons? Per­haps the ideas would be to allow users to asso­ciate sym­bols with the words them­selves, or at least have the option to over­ride the default icon.

Com­mu­ni­cate: Web­wide is pro­vided on a sub­scrip­tion model and is PC-only (30-day demo available).

Does it work with any site? Prob­a­bly not, from their guidelines:

While Web­wide inter­prets clear, well-written HTML; some lay­outs and styles will be more effec­tive than oth­ers. To this end, we will be pro­duc­ing guide­lines for web design­ers who would like to make their infor­ma­tion acces­si­ble through Webwide.

Hope­fully their guide­lines are in line with already estab­lished web stan­dards and guidelines.

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

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.

Speakwire — Online RSS Reader

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. It’s the near­est eqi­va­lent to a com­mon cur­rency and can be exchanged and under­sood as eas­ily. Speech is might­ier than the pen.

(via Robin Good)

Speegle Speaks

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.