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The ReadSpeaker Blog


Online text to speech for tourism: Q&A with Visitmalta

by Aloisia Gabat on July 13, 2012 at 9:00 am 

VisitmaltaVisitmalta.com is the official tourism portal for the Maltese Islands and is managed by the Malta Tourism Authority. Its aim is to provide information about the islands of Malta, Gozo, and Comino as a tourism destination in the heart of the Mediterranean. Focusing on the main aspects of Malta’s tourism product – heritage, hospitality, and diversity – and highlighting the many things to see and do while on holiday there, the website is currently available in 10 languages. ReadSpeaker was implemented on the English and German versions of the site, with French, Italian and Spanish to follow shortly.

I recently interviewed Michael Piscopo, Director, Visitmalta, about his experiences with ReadSpeaker.

ReadSpeaker (RS): Why did you decide to speech-enable your website?
Michael Piscopo (MP): Our website – visitmalta.com – is a destination information and marketing tool which aims to reach the widest possible target audience. We are aware that some people find problems accessing the information we provide in text format, due to visual impairments or reading difficulties. By speech-enabling our site, we have virtually eliminated these hurdles and significantly improved our website’s accessibility.

RS: How did you learn about ReadSpeaker and its solutions?
MP: We discovered ReadSpeaker quite by chance. I happened to be browsing a transport-related website and noticed the little speaker icon at the top of the page. I clicked on it and was impressed by the quality of the text-to-speech rendition. It was much closer to human speech, more fluent and more realistic than anything I had heard before.

RS: How much effort was involved to add ReadSpeaker to your website?
MP: Very little. Once we got the code, it was a matter of a few hours work to get it up and running. I think it took us longer to choose which voice to use from the various options provided (Male, Female, US English, UK English, etc) than to actually tag the site.

RS: How have you benefited from having a talking website?
MP: Apart from the obvious benefits in terms of increased marketing reach, I think the fact that we have invested in such a feature is also indicative of our efforts to remove barriers for visitors to our country. The holiday experience often starts online, and it is in our interest to make life easier for all our visitors, even before they get here.

RS: How satisfied are your website visitors with the ReadSpeaker listen feature?
MP: From the feedback we have received so far, our website visitors are very satisfied with the ReadSpeaker feature. Before introducing it to our site, we also sought advice from professionals in the field and the feedback we received from them was highly positive. We were also happy to discover that people are opting to listen to the information without having to read it on the screen, which ‘frees’ them to do something else at the same time. This is not surprising, considering how we are all leaning to multi-task.

RS: Would you recommend that other organizations add ReadSpeaker to their website?
MP: Without a doubt. It is cost-effective and makes an instant impact on every page of the website. With so many different languages already available, and more to come, ReadSpeaker is particularly ideal for companies and organizations operating in a geographically-diverse market.

RS: Do you have any additional feedback about ReadSpeaker?
MP: Well, I can add what when my developers needed assistance to customize ReadSpeaker for a new website that we are building, they found the ReadSpeaker support team extremely prompt and efficient.

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Citizen engagement through advanced technologies

by Joop Heijenrath on June 19, 2012 at 4:11 pm 

Returning back from a seminar on Citizen Engagement in DC this week, I am excited to see how many technologies are out there to connect citizens around the world with their federal, state or local government. Among the technology providers were Salesforce.com, Adobe, ReadSpeaker and GovDelivery.com.

During this morning event in downtown DC, only a block away from the Whitehouse, government leaders, policy makers, technology providers shared their best practises on how to engage with citizens, from a government perspective. The time has long passed for most parties to solely rely on facebook and twitter for their social media interactions. Sophisticated tools have been developed to handle public calender management, to crowd source for local solutions, to connect marines from across the world with their homes.

In this context, one of our clients presented what they had done with ReadSpeaker as a way to create interaction and deeper understanding of the content on their website. The client is the National institute for Drug Abuse, and their advisor Palladian Partners has done an outstanding job to create a website that deeply engages with the target audience. After several focus groups in under privileged areas of the DC metro, they came to the conclusion that the website had to be build up in a very accessible way. For the NIDA website that meant 3 things :

  • creating easy to read texts without jargon and difficult lexicon
  • using simple icons and pictures to tell the story as much as possible
  • providing a read-aloud function that helps the visitor to listen to the text as well as read it.

Since ReadSpeaker works on any device that is connected to the internet, since it does not require a download (especially for those who look up the information at public computers in libraries etc) and since its user interface is extremely simple, it was the selected choice for the read-aloud function.

After a painless implementation, it was launched when the new website went live. Usage has been very good so far, with around 5% of all pageviews generating a click on the ReadSpeaker listen icon, equating to somewhere between 15-20% of all website visitors using ReadSpeaker.

During a panel session that preceded the presentation held by Beth Maloney, CEO of Palladian Partners, Stefani Cuschnir from ReadSpeaker discussed the ease of use and the general benefits of ReadSpeaker as a tool on websites to open the content up for the roughly 20% of the population that has reading difficulties. In the panel with her was the keynote speaker for the event, who is a lt colonel for the marine corps, working as their social media director, who explained the challenges of the marine corps members to stay in touch with their beloved ones at home in a safe and secure way. He is a very strong user of the new social media technologies that are on offer today. We might see some of the marines’ websites use ReadSpeaker in the near future.

It is encouraging to see how some organizations are really at the forefront of the new technologies, but I wonder why I seldom see them being used in my hometown, for day-to-day engagement with the local government about issues that we all care about ?

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4 reasons health-related content benefits from online text to speech

by Roy Lindemann on May 25, 2012 at 5:09 pm 

Medical
We have a number of customers who come from the health sector, both for profit and non profit. Some target  kids or teenagers or families. Others are pharmaceutical companies or research institutes. Some of our health sites have a very high and consistent usage of our listen button.

There are some common reasons for which healthcare businesses and organizations decide to speech-enable their online content. Here are 4 main reasons:

  1. Increase the accessibility of their online text content for people who have visual impairments, are dyslexic, or need more accessibility, such as foreign patients and children.
  2. Have (large amounts of) text read aloud, such as descriptions of diseases, prescriptions, and drug information leaflets. These types of content need to be well understood to avoid misuse which in certain cases can be dramatic.
  3. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an area of importance, notably for larger pharmaceutical companies. Adding a service like ReadSpeaker extends CSR to the online content of these companies.
  4. It is a new and helpful way to distribute information to as many users as possible. With the mobile Internet growing exponentially, providing audio access to written content on smaller phone screens is becoming more useful by the day.

Contact us if you want to find out more about how online text to speech can help your online content become more useful.

Photo Credit: RambergMediaImages

Posted in: Customers General Online Text to Speech
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How Text To Speech Improved My Life

by Fredrik Larsson on May 3, 2012 at 1:15 pm 

My name is Fredrik Larsson and I am the CTO of ReadSpeaker. My first contact with TTS (short for Text To Speech) was in the mid 80s. I was 14 years old, doing some period of practical occupational experience in school, together with a blind researcher in history. He used it together with software that could read the screen aloud to him. It was a quite robotic voice but I could hear what it was saying and I got some idea that I maybe could use computers like my friends.

My next experience was a kind of Nim game played with a computer as opponent, and the computer talked to me. It was the same kind of synthetic voice but it was almost like playing a game with a human being. This meant that I was even able to play those text adventure games and some more simple ones not requiring graphics. It was now time to do some serious investigations and try to get hold of a computer with Text-To-Speech for use in school.

I got my first IBM computer, about 2 dm high, and 5 dm wide and deep. It was not an ABC80 or C64, but my friends thought this was even cooler – and it could talk. Back in that time, a TTS system was a 4 dm long ISA card that one plugged into a computer and connected it to a standard car speaker. It was controlled by a separate box with thick knobs for volume and on/off. Some years later, external Text-To-Speech systems came to market. They were boxes, about the size of an iPad, but 2 inches thick, and you could carry them between different computers and connect them, without the need for a screwdriver.

I used TTS quite heavily in the early 90s, mostly at home, since my university studies were more convenient to do using braille. However, I used quite a lot of talking books, mostly in science, so I realized that having something that could talk is not enough. It also matters how the information is read to make it understandable. Reading everything from left to right, top to bottom, is often not the best way to convey something aloud to someone.

I then stayed away from TTS until 2001, when my work with ReadSpeaker technology started. TTS had then made a dramatic change. The voices sounded almost like humans, but unfortunately they also made some of the mistakes as people tend to do, such as speaking a bit more sloppy. The old classic voices appeared very clear, you could even hear spelling errors in the original text. This was not as simple to do with the more natural sounding voices, but they attracted new target groups, both people that listened to text while reading it themselves simultaneously, and people that wanted to consume information by listening to it, instead of reading it on paper or screen.

TTS in itself is not enough to produce a nice user experience when listening to complete tables, formulas, and image descriptions. It must also be complemented with good automatic processing of documents and web pages to produce a high-quality narration. Listening to all the audio books and teachers describing what they wrote on the blackboard during all these years in school and university has definitely made it clear to me that quality is more than voice and audio. One of our greatest challenges for the future is to make new Text-To-Speech systems sounding as clear and exact as the classic ones, still having as nice sounding voices as real people, but without the sometimes too sloppy reading.

Posted in: Online Text to Speech Speech Synthesis
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Different aspects of accessibility in web product development

by Niclas Bergstrom on April 27, 2012 at 8:30 am 

When developing web based products that are supposed to be a piece of the accessibility puzzle, such as ReadSpeaker, the product itself must obviously not introduce new difficulties for the users. They need to be made to work everywhere and for everyone, always. How is that achievable? Our approach to this is that we put as much of the intelligence as possible on the server side, and only put what is absolutely needed on the client side (in our case the “client side” is on the website where ReadSpeaker is implemented – not the end user side). And any JavaScript components that are used to increase the user experience for visitors using browsers that support it, we host in the cloud. This way we can make sure that the user experience is the same, or in the worst case similar on all platforms, and we can easily update the cloud scripts as the web evolves. Since most web browsers have support for different techniques and have different abilities to view embedded media (such as audio streams) we can adapt what is sent from the server-side fully depending on what kind of device and browser the end user uses. And by using obtrusive scripts with graceful transformation, we make sure that even the simplest technology used on the client side can also get the speech back. Basically, it needs to be able to provide the core functionality even without requiring JavaScript support or possibilities to embed rich media. You never know what the visitor might use to browse your site or use the online product. Even though the majority uses the Top 5 browsers I would say stopping there just isn’t enough. It does not make sense to lock people out for no or the wrong reasons. A reason should never be “If you can’t have it all you shouldn’t have anything”.

By developing the core functionality of a web based product using the simplest possible pieces and following the specifications, you can ensure maximum possible visitors/users. Additional UI features and user experience bells and whistles should be added on top of it, like the ketchup on a hot dog. The hot dog is totally eatable also without the add-ons, even though it wouldn’t be as nice, it makes a very small difference if you are really hungry!

Apart from developing a platform and browser independent solution, there are also a number of others important aspects of creating an accessible web product. The user interface should be keyboard accessible, as intuitive as possible and in general be very easy to use. In the ReadSpeaker case, we make sure that the speech is always only ‘One Click Away’.

Web products and web applications that provide flexibility for the customer on how they are implemented can sometimes have some drawbacks. With flexibility also comes responsibility. It can become difficult for a company developing these kind of product to always guarantee the functionality if implementers with low skills in web accessibility get too creative. The implementation instructions we provide to our customers guarantee that they will be as end user friendly in general and as accessible as possible in particular.

Apart from the technical side of things, nothing beats end user tests. We try to gather a relevant number of people from the intended target groups and observe them while using the service and following the tests ask them number of questions. Then, we often go back to the drawing table and incorporate the missing pieces.

One of the difficulties is always to combine the requirements from very different user groups to get to a “design for all” solution at the end, but once there, If you make sure that it is functional for the users with the greatest difficulties; it is then usually the case that it is very usable for everybody.

Posted in: Web Accessibility
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Using online text to speech in new ways

by Joop Heijenrath on April 20, 2012 at 5:29 pm 

image for phone tourReadSpeaker has traditionally been strong in speech-enabling websites. We are the world market leader in that domain. Over time, we have become involved in speech-enabling (news) apps. More recently, we have seen that clients have requested our services in a variety of ways, where the text-to-speech technology is baked into their own product.

Besides the adoption of text to speech in online teaching curricula, ReadSpeaker has also been embedded into online therapy. In this way, patients are able to receive therapy at home behind their computer screen and therapeutic texts are read to the patient.

Another way of embedding ReadSpeaker into other products where speech can play a major role is to use text-to-speech technology to build audio tours for cities, museums, and other tourist attractions. Recent discussions with clients across Europe, the US, and Australia have given us very positive feedback with regard to the feasibility of this concept.

The concept is rather simple: embed the text-to-speech engine into an editing platform for mobile internet applications. For the content owner/museum, this will deliver an easy-to-use, flexible platform to create audio tours for its visitors on their mobile devices (Android, iOS, etc.).

The museums and cultural institutions that received a presentation were very interested: it provides them with a flexible tool that they can maintain and author themselves. They can publish tours, change and update them on the fly, and provide the visitors of the museum with additional services without having to invest in hardware devices with difficult-to-maintain and inflexible prerecordings.

Some of the institutions that I visited in both NYC and Australia complained about the expense of the current tour apps that they had in place. The costs were astronomical, the flexibility was nonexistent, and the process to create them had left some frustrating scars in the organization because of the difficult cooperation with external agencies.

The nice thing about this new service is that the power is completely in the hands of the cultural institution. You build your own tour, you choose which elements to include, which texts to be read, which pictures to be shown, what sequence to follow, etc. And very important, the user interface to both build the tours (as the content owner) and to play the tours (as a visitor) is completely intuitive and is built by following the “users as designers” principle.

With the arrival of Siri, the voice recognition service of the iPhone, it has become clear that voice services as credible man-machine interactions have become a reality. Yet it is clear that the built-in voice technology of today still is not perfect. Online services can therefore be a major step forward. Especially with the fast development of online connectivity of networks, the cloud will become more and more a place for these solutions.

ReadSpeaker has been cloud-based from the start. The development of networks and the need for voice services are going hand in hand with our development path. It is clear that online voice services will play a major role in the future of man-machine interactions.

Posted in: Customers Online Text to Speech
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How to find it?

by Staffan Meij on April 16, 2012 at 2:56 pm 

How do you find a speech button on the website? That is a question that people often ask us. Of course, we try to promote a consistent way of providing the button on a website and a way of implementation that ensures the highest chance that people will find the button. So a big button! Preferably one that made up of both a text (Listen!) and a graphical part (ReadSpeaker standard Listen button).  And preferably as close to the content as possible. For example, next to the header of the article. Or just below the article header.

Remember: a speech button on a website is not a function that replaces reading! It supports the reading, and listening to the text while reading at the same time greatly enhances the understanding of many people who have difficulty reading texts.

In our broad experience of supporting customers that have implemented our speech functionality on their websites, we have seen many interesting variations on the same theme. So let’s have a look at one such example. UMC Groningen, the largest hospital in the northern part of the Netherlands, has added our speech functionality to their website. Here you see the speech button implementation:

UMC Groningen Listen button

What is really nice is that they have decided to have an audio introduction message the first time you visit their home page. It will tell the visitor something like “welcome…you find a speech button on this website if you want to listen to the content of the webpage”. To have such an introduction message is a real help and at the same time is hardly intrusive for the web visitor! And the button is well designed, consisting of both a text and a graphical part.

Still, we feel there is also room for improvement because the placement of the button is quite far from the text; a spot next to the print button or just below the article header would be better. Even if that might be so, if we look at usage statistics then we clearly see that the audio introduction of the speech function is a huge success! Usage of the speech function is many times more than on other comparable websites!

Looking at examples like this gives you a good feel for what options and choices there are and to determine for your own specific situation which design is best to help your visitors find their way to the speech function on your website. And an audio introduction clearly seems the way to go!

Be sure to contact us when you’re ready to add speech to your website!

Posted in: Customers Online Text to Speech Usability
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How children can benefit from talking websites

by Roy Lindemann on March 28, 2012 at 11:03 am 

Cicero Kids logo

In our Q&A series, we are very pleased to have had some time to discuss with Bert Zahniser, Vice-President of Technology of the American Institute of History Education, and Laureen Hungo-Brady, Instructional Design and Curriculum Editor of CICERO Kids™ .

The American Institute for History Education’s (AIHE) mission is to provide substantive, engaging historical content and activities for teachers to use in their classrooms that will dramatically increase students’ comprehension of historical events, personalities, issues, and trends. The American Institute for History Education was founded to provide history teachers with high quality professional development programs, firmly anchored in rich historical content, along with substantive historical lessons, activities, and resources to use in their classrooms.

AIHE recently launched CICERO Kids™ which is a convenient and cost-effective, anytime classroom tool that is comprised of five online units (sold separately or in modules). Each unit is a complete and comprehensive program designed modularly so that it may be added to other units to expand the series. An interactive museum is the setting for students in Pre-K through 5th grade to learn about American history and social studies from the first explorers to the early 20th Century. CICERO Kids™ lets students explore a great lobby and meet a cast of interactive characters who are waiting to share their “Did you Know” facts.

Since CICERO Kids™ lessons are available on a subscription basis, they created a special demo page where you can see and listen to ReadSpeaker in action.

Roy Lindemann (ReadSpeaker): Why did you add ReadSpeaker to your CICERO Kids website?

Laureen Hungo-Brady (AIHE): I’ll discuss the educational reasons first and then hand over to Bert. There are 2 reasons for which we believe ReadSpeaker is a useful tool for the children who use our site. We have a wide range of students from pre-kindergarten to 5th grade with different levels of reading comprehension going from non-readers to more advanced readers. The children use our website with the help of teachers and at other times by themselves. With the help of ReadSpeaker’s listen button, all children can now listen actively to the different text contents we have in our interactive musuem. ReadSpeaker provides the right breadth so that all our students can use it easily. The second reason is that ReadSpeaker helps struggling readers validate what they are reading. The dynamic conversion of text into high quality speech enables these readers to hear if they are reading the text correctly from a phonetic point of view.  The synchronized highlighting of the words as they are being read enables a better comprehension of the written content. This helps empower non readers, beginner and struggling readers as well as students with English as a second language.

Bert Zahniser (AIHE): From a technical point of view, the 2 fundamental reasons that made us choose ReadSpeaker are the synchronized highlighting of the words being read and the quality of the text to speech voices. We also like the various voices that are available.

Laureen Hungo-Brady: Can I add that another reason of importance in adding ReadSpeaker, is the current focus on literacy, in conjunction with the National Common Core Standards. The synchronized highlighting as the text is being converted to speech improves literacy by helping the eye track the words that are being spoken thereby associating sound and meaning.

Roy Lindemann: What has the feedback been so far?

Laureen Hungo-Brady: It’s been absolutely great. Teachers really see the value in the highlighting and tracking of the words as they are being speech-enabled.

Roy Lindemann: How easy has it been to add ReadSpeaker to the CICERO Kids website?

Bert Zahniser: It went very smoothly. We implemented ReadSpeaker on our development, staging and production sites and it worked nicely from the start. We got good support from your technical team to deal with the sign-in aspect of our site. Our pages were speech-enabled in a couple of hours and it took only about 2 weeks to fully test and fine-tune aspects of the player such as the look and the positioning until we were ready to release to the public.

Roy Lindemann: How did ReadSpeaker cope with the pronunciation of your written content?

Bert Zahniser: We were pleasantly surprised how accurately ReadSpeaker interpreted the pronunciation of our content including names. As a history provider, we have lots of names of people and places that can be hard to pronounce.  I expected quite a few pronunciation issues but thus far have had only a couple that we needed to have corrected.

Roy Lindemann: To what type of content owners would you recommend our service?

Laureen Hungo-Brady and Bert Zahniser: Any website that targets struggling readers, beginning readers or language learners would greatly benefit from adding a service like yours.

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ReadSpeaker docReader being used to test documents on their accessibility before publishing by Australian Federal Government Departments

by Joop Heijenrath on March 22, 2012 at 12:14 pm 

Recently I visited some of our clients  in Australia. We had several meetings with existing long term clients and some engaging sessions with new prospects. It is clear that accessibility is high on the agenda of the Australian public. There is a major effort to implement WCAG2.0 and the knowledge level of the Australian webmasters about the topic is impressive. A few things were striking during the long meetings that we had; online text to speech is an excellent tool to help the accessibility of a website, and most of our existing and new clients understand that and see that as one of the reasons to implement ReadSpeaker on their website. The usage statistics for the ReadSpeaker services are excellent and I was pleased to see such a large group of keen ambassadors of our solutions.

During the meetings, we discovered another striking new way of using ReadSpeaker for accessibility purposes. A way that we had not envisaged before. In several of our meetings with the Australian Federal government departments, it became clear that many of the PDF and Word documents that are displayed on the government’s website are not accessible. They have been produced in times when accessibility was not an important attribute. Lay-out and design took the forefront. This has created a major task for government institutions, as all information needs to be accessible by year end 2012. Some of the more innovative departments have been using our ReadSpeaker docReader tool on their websites to read PDF documents. The perfect reading of these documents depends on their level of accessibility;  the better they are tagged, the better they are read.

This fact has led some departments to use ReadSpeaker in a slightly different way. It has become a gate keeper to test a document on its accessibility before it is published on a website. When someone wants to publish a document (from inside the department or from an external agency), ReadSpeaker docReader is now being implemented as a checker on the staging/testing server. Any PDF, ODF, Word document can be checked on its correct accessibility tagging by running it through the docReader tool. If it reads correctly, it is correctly tagged. This proves to be a great help for the creators of the content. In many cases these are external agencies that create these documents for the Federal government. Our clients have found an interesting way to use the ReadSpeaker products to help them test the accessibility of their own content. That is probably one of the best proofs of the alignment of ReadSpeaker to the online accessibility goals of WCAG2.0.

While I was in Australia, Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, launched the National Year of Reading. Australia is facing 4.5M people with literacy issues. That is a stunning 20% of the 22M population in Australia. These percentage numbers are similar in other developed countries across the globe. The ReadSpeaker technology offers a great help for these struggling readers, not only by assisting them to read and understand the content of the online texts, but also by helping them to learn to read better. Our technology of synchronized text highlighting while listening offers the capability to learn to read better over time.

Posted in: General Illiteracy Products
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Illiteracy is a tragedy

by Roy Lindemann on March 9, 2012 at 6:44 pm 

Those are the words of the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in a speech given to launch the National Year of Reading campaign on February 14. About 4.5 million working-age adults Australians do not have the necessary higher reading and numeracy skills to succeed in work or study, Ms Gillard said. According to the The National Year of Reading 2012 project, nearly half the Australian population struggles without the literacy skills to meet the most basic demands of everyday life and work. There are 46% of Australians who can’t read newspapers; follow a recipe; make sense of timetables, or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle. This is just the latest statistical example of how illiteracy is affecting countries in all parts of the globe.

According to the UNESCO, 793 million adults suffer from illiteracy in the world. Over half of the adult population of Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Haiti, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Sierra Leone are illiterate. 21% of women in the world are illiterate.

In France, 9% of the adult population suffers from functional illiteracy. Over half of the people who are functionally illiterate in France have a job.

In the United States, a study by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, showed that 22% of adults were below basic in quantitative literacy in 2003 (indicating they possess no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills). 63 million adults - 29% of the United States adult population – over age 16 don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level. An additional 30 million - 14 % of the country’s adult population – can only read at a fifth grade level or lower.

Posted in: General Illiteracy
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