Talk to me - add speech to your site (updated)

Please add speech to my website

(added Natural reader)

The aim of a web site is to help people keep in touch with the organisation and its aims. But at the moment the internet is often a very wordy place to be. 56% of the adult population has some literacy problems and this increases amongst groups of people whose education was interrupted by ill health or other problems. There is also a significant immigrant community where English is not their first language and reading in a foreign language is difficult.

There is also a large number of people with eyesight problems who find it difficult to see the text on a screen because of the size of the text or the contrast.

Dyslexia is another important area that should not be forgotten and the needs of dyslexic people must be considered.

So can we make your web site talk?

Yes, BUT.   is the answer.

Creating a system that only works on specific pages of your site does not aid accessibility of the web, it becomes exclusive. Below we have identified a number of options.

You can

• record a voice over for your web page and provide a link. There are products such as "Audacity" which are open source and can be downloaded for free. Which will record your voice and save it to a file which can then be added to your site.
• Use a web broadcast tool such as Ipadio. Which is ideal for Blogging, it will record your voice and provide a transcript, this can then be linked to or embedded in the web site.
• Some browsers now have Text To Speech (sometimes abbreviated to TTS). My preference is Fire Vox which works within the ForeFox browser.
• Microsoft have added Narration to there Operating Systems which is limited but worth a mention having now spent some time trying to get Narrator to read what I wanted to listen to and failing - I have given up.
• There are also a range of screen readers available. Read Please has a free version available.
• You can add demonstrations of each system to your web site by using a screen video capture option such as JING
• You can also capture your thoughts using a web cam which you can then embed into your site using YouTube
• Natural Reader 9 is available as a fre download that will read the content of your web site, outlook emails or word documents.  The paid for version allows you to create a MP3 file from a text file. This link will give you more info about Natural Reader

The benefit of using these is that you are enabling people to use the Internet and all that the internet has to offer rather than just your own site. A solution that once mastered will empower and encourage people to keep involved.

How to add them

You should have a page on your site that deals with accessibility. On the page I suggest that you have links to a variety of different solutions.

You should ideally have video clips or Jing clips that will show how products can be found, installed and used. Tell people about your page and other sites will be keen to link to your site. Remember that good incoming links will raise the profile of your site in search engines.

That is all for now. I will try and add a few links and audio to this page when I get some more time.