Why EPUB 3 is Important for Digital Publishing

by Roy Lindemann on July 31, 2013 at 10:28 am 

Books - then and now

In 2012, e-book sales overtook the sales of print books for the first time ever, marking the tipping point in a paradigm shift that has been a long time coming in the publishing industry. With the rising popularity of e-books comes the need for an industry standard format for publishing accessibility, which EPUB 3, created by the International Digital Publishing Forum, hopes to establish. In March of 2013, the International Publishers Association announced their endorsement of EPUB 3 for accessible publishing, stating that they “strongly urge all publishing industry stakeholders to adopt EPUB 3,” so that the industry “can achieve an interoperable and fully accessible global standard for e-books and other digital publications.”

That all sounds great of course, but what does this mean for for the publishing industry as a whole? For one, EPUB 3 was designed to address criticisms of previous EPUB editions, which were said to be unfit for the publication of specialty texts like comic books, lacking in annotation abilities, possess substandard language support, unable to support rich media and interactivity, deficient in navigation support, and not up to necessary accessibility standards. A long list, yes, but EPUB 3 has widely addressed those issues, as evidenced by the endorsements the format has received from major global publishing bodies. If the publishing industry was going to shift ever further into the e-book realm and away from traditional print media, all types of texts would have to be supported by an industry standard format, and experts believe that EPUB 3 accomplishes that goal.

By establishing an industry standard for accessible publishing, opportunities to create e-book content are available to those who may previously have lacked the capability to do so. For example, in the past different types of e-readers worked on different formats, making it difficult for smaller publishers, especially, to create far-reaching content. Instead of creating one e-book that was accessible to all readers, a small publisher would have to focus on one format or another, thereby missing the opportunity for their text to reach a maximum number of readers. Beyond that, for self-publishers or indie authors, the task of creating and formatting a written text into e-book format may have been too daunting a task to take on, especially given the time it takes to write a text in addition to the time it takes to format it for e-book publication.

Accessible publishing is a hot-button issue in the publishing industry today because it has an effect on everyone from readers to writers to the publishers themselves. As EPUB 3 is adapted by more and more e-reader companies – Apple’s iBooks application is among the list of players who are using or plan to use the EPUB 3 format – the publishing of texts in e-book format will be open to more people than ever. For readers, EPUB 3 promises an improved reading experience, with features like pop-up footnotes, in-text navigation, improved interactivity, enhanced images,media overlays and text to speech in e-books. For writers, the adaptation of an industry standard for e-book formatting means an easier time getting your work published over many mediums, and the chance to reach a maximum number of readers. Overall, if EPUB 3 is widely adapted as planned, although this might take more time than envisaged, and delivers on the enhanced functionality it promises, the publishing industry could be entering a more inclusive, accessible era of e-books.

Image Credit: spykster

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ReadSpeaker speechMaker: How to easily create audio files from any text content

by Roy Lindemann on June 25, 2013 at 3:07 pm 

We have recently revamped our ReadSpeaker speechMaker service for an even better, easier, and more complete experience for creating audio files from text content. The nice thing with text to speech is that it provides consistent conditions for easily generating audio files at any time and at a reduced cost. Compare this to real recordings where the voice quality of a speaker can change from one recording to another and costs can quickly get out of hand, not to mention the delays before actually getting the desired result.

Our new speechMaker has been designed and developed to enable you to quickly and efficiently convert your text content into high quality speech. You can create audio files from any connected device since the service is cloud based. We have designed the user interface so that you can get started in seconds.

The speechMaker web-based user interface enables you to enter or copy any text, listen to the audio version, and then produce the audio file if you are happy with the result. There are settings to control the speed and/or pitch and to choose between different languages and voices.

Screen shot 2013-06-25 at 3.48.25 PM

You also have access to your own specific dictionary so that you can control or fine-tune the pronunciation of the text you wish to convert to speech. You can at any time preview how your changes sound before generating the audio file.

Screen shot 2013-06-25 at 3.51.46 PM

ReadSpeaker speechMaker provides you with statistics where you can see the number of characters and words that have been converted to speech each month/year per voice you have chosen.

Screen shot 2013-06-25 at 3.56.40 PM

Here are some examples of offline and online applications where speechMaker can help you easily generate audio files:

  • Add a voice-over to your e-learning and training content. You now have an audio version on top of your original text content so that more of your users can follow your courses.
  • Do you have a presentation that would benefit from an audio overlay? Just copy/paste the text of the presentation into our tool and embed the generated audio file into your presentation. It’s as easy as that!
  • Would you like your staff to have the ability to listen to company manuals while on the job? Use speechMaker to make it easier for them to train.
  • Do you work for a museum or a tourist office? Why not let your visitors enjoy a talking guide? Whenever you have new content to add, just use our tool and add the audio files. And this also works for any airport or train station too!
  • Do you have ever-changing telephony or mobile application text messages? Now you can easily provide your users with the updated voice prompts instead of having to pre-record your message each time.
  • Easily update your IVR messages without the hassle of bringing in a speaker for each modified version.

Let us know if you have any specific needs for generating audio files on the go with ReadSpeaker speechMaker.

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3 myths about text to speech

by Roy Lindemann on June 14, 2013 at 12:28 pm 

Sign post with myths and facts

For blind users only…

Not only. Text to speech helps millions of users such as people with limited literacy skills, learners, dyslectics, foreign-born, multitaskers, seniors and more. A Unesco report shows that 793 million adults in the world can neither read nor write. 30 million US adults have below basic understanding of the English language. Text to speech is of course very important for helping blind users access written content but it also facilitates the lives of many other people as well.

Only available as a desktop application…

Text to speech is available in many different forms; desktop applications being an example amongst others. It can be found in browser plugins, built-in different operating systems, but also for content owners to use as a service so that their end users benefit from the best possible customized speech experience. We believe that content owners such as e-learning companies for example should control how their courses are delivered in audio format and their end-users should just sit back, click & listen!

Text-to-speech voices are robotic and dull…

Text to speech has greatly evolved since the late 18th century and the invention of this technology by Wolfgang von Kempelen. At ReadSpeaker, we use a technique called unit selection that generates voices that are near-to-human in sound. They are based on real recorded speech which is then sampled. This is still what is called concatenation synthesis but the used units are larger than phonemes, sometimes complete sentences. Try out some of the 35+ languages we propose and tell us what you think!

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Does adding ReadSpeaker slow down a website?

by Anton Ijäs on May 16, 2013 at 2:58 pm 

We’re often asked by our clients if our Enterprise Highlighting service will slow down the loading time of their website. This is a question of great importance and we encourage more website owners to spend more time optimizing their website, thus giving their users a better experience when visiting the website. In this post, I’m going to explain why Enterprise Highlighting only has a minimal impact on the loading time.

What is website loading time?

First, we have to agree on what “loading time” means. The loading time can be described in two ways:

  • The time it takes until everything on the webpage is loaded.
  • The time it takes before a user can see and interact with the content of the webpage.

I believe the most important one is the time it takes before users can see and interact with the content of the website because this is the loading time that users experience even if everything is not loaded at that point. That’s also the loading time that we’ll be focusing on in this blog post.

There are several aspects that could affect the loading time on a website:

  • The size of the files that are loaded (CSS files, JavaScripts, images, etc.) and the amount of HTML code.
  • The code that has to be executed (only relevant for JavaScripts).
  • If the file is loaded asynchronously or if the browser has to finish loading the file before continuing with the next item.
  • Response time (how long it takes before a server responds on a request).
  • Server bandwidth (with what speed a server can send a file to the user).
  • User bandwidth (with what speed a user can receive files from the server).

I’m going to cover the first three aspects of loading time, but it’s important to take the other aspects into consideration as well.

How is loading time affected by adding ReadSpeaker Enterprise Highlighting?

Traditionally, many website owners look at the size of the files (CSS files, JavaScripts, images, etc.) to be loaded and the time it takes to load them. However, it’s very important to also consider that a browser has to stop and execute a JavaScript before it moves on to the next file.

When implementing Enterprise Highlighting, a JavaScript is added to the HTML code of the website. The script is called ReadSpeaker.js and it loads together with the rest of the page content. The size of this script is only 10 kB. We can compare that size to the logo of a website that is considered minimalistic and fast, namely google.com, where the size of the logo is around 19 kB (almost twice the size as our script).

Once the main JavaScript (ReadSpeaker.js) is loaded, the other necessary JavaScript components will be loaded at the same time as the rest of the page content. This method is called asynchronous loading and it’s the same method that newer implementations of Google Analytics use to speed up the time it takes before a user can see and interact with the page content. Find out more about the difference between asynchronous and synchronous loading in the section below.

Once all JavaScript components are loaded, the service is ready to be used. This can happen before the rest of the page has finished loading or after the rest of the page has finished loading since it’s not dependent on when other content on the page is loaded. If a click on the Listen button occurs before all components are ready, the service will hold the click until all components are ready and then start the player. The components are usually ready before the page content since it only takes a few seconds for them to load and execute.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous loading

Asynchronous loading is much faster than synchronous loading because browsers don’t have to stop and execute each individual JavaScript when loading the page content. When using asynchronous loading the browser will load and execute scripts in the background and continue loading the rest of the page content at the same time. Synchronous loading, on the other hand, means that JavaScripts load together with other content in a queue like fashion, thus adding to the loading time. The JavaScripts have to be executed along the way, which is why we don’t use synchronous loading for our JavaScript components.

sync-vs-async

Conclusion

Thanks to the method that we use for loading the script components (asynchronous loading), the loading time of a website is barely affected. The difference in loading time with our service on the page compared to not having our service on the page is minimal since the only script that really affects the loading time is the 10 kB main script. Yes, we still use bandwidth when loading our scripts and it could also affect the loading time of a page. However the effect of asynchronous loading would be so small that it’s hard to measure unless a user has a really low bandwidth.

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Text to speech for education: Q&A with Renee Citlau (Anaheim Union High School District)

by Roy Lindemann on May 8, 2013 at 9:19 am 

Renee Citlau has taught high school for the Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) for sixteen years.  While participating in Pepperdine’s online master’s degree program, Renee became inspired by the potential of online education to improve student engagement, increase equity in course offerings, and develop the 21st century skills such as creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication that students need in order to compete in a global economy. With this in mind, Renee developed the district’s first online course six years ago.  Since then, the online program has grown to include twelve online teachers in a variety of content areas.  She provides ongoing support and training to online teachers in curriculum development, online technology, and online instructional strategies. Renee was named the 2013 National Online Teacher of the Year, an honor presented annually by the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). Renee has kindly accepted to give us her feedback on text to speech as a resource to help students.

ReadSpeaker (RS): How long have you been aware of text to speech technology?
Renee Citlau: I became aware of ReadSpeaker last year at a workshop that I attended.

RS. What where the reasons that convinced you that this technology could help you better teach your online business courses?
Renee Citlau: We always look for ways to make our curriculum accessible for all students including English learners, long-term English learners, and students with disabilities.  We know that many students struggle with reading and we want to provide support for struggling readers.

RS: Which groups of students in your online classes benefit the most from text to speech?
Renee Citlau: Any student that is a struggling reader will benefit from text to speech.  English learner and long-term English learners are particularly helped by text to speech.  Many of these students have oral proficiency in English, but they are lacking reading and writing skills.  Text to speech helps to provide the scaffolding these students need in order to access the curriculum.  In addition, English learners hear the correct pronunciation of the words which helps them in their language acquisition.  It takes 5 to 7 years for students to develop academic English.  Text to speech is one of the tools we can use so that our English learners can participate in rigorous classes while, at the same time, develop their literacy skills.

RS: What benefits do you see in having content being presented in visual and audio formats at the same time?
Renee Citlau: Students have a choice in reading without the audio or listening to the audio while each word is highlighted.

RS: How does the highlighting of the text as it is being read benefit your students?
Renee Citlau: Students hear and read along with each word which helps to reinforce language acquisition and their learning.

RS: Do you see ReadSpeaker as a tool that benefits students with reading disabilities?
Renee Citlau: ReadSpeaker  is a tool that helps students with reading disabilities become better readers and the ability to access knowledge and gain skills that were previously closed because of their reading disability.

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The Importance of Tashkil

by Hannah Hassig on April 11, 2013 at 9:24 am 

tashkil

Tashkil are the various diacritics that are attached to Arabic letters to indicate features including vowels, gemination, and absence of any vowels. Arabic texts are typically written without tashkil, as fluent speakers can comprehend the text by automatically filling in these diacritics. Image at right: Arabic text with tashkil.

The human brain is exemplary at filling in these diacritics, despite the fact that there is an average of 11.6 possible diacritizations for every non-diacritized word (Debili et al., 1998). That’s a lot of possible choices.

Automated systems, such as the one behind ReadSpeaker’s text-to-speech technology, are quite good at determining the diacritics for particular words. However, a computer is no replacement for a fluent speaker and will consequently make more errors than a fluent speaker. This is why, when listening to Arabic TTS, reading a text written without tashkil, a fluent speaker will be able to determine where exactly the errors are. Whilst the ReadSpeaker team can fix the pronunciation of individual words in specific locations, any new texts written without tashkil will contain new pronunciation errors on the basis of the computer algorithm.

How can you help improve the quality of the Arabic voices and decrease the number of errors? By writing texts with tashkil! This may be time-consuming, but at the end of the day, it’s beneficial to everyone. The ReadSpeaker voices improve, and more people can read the Arabic text, as texts written without tashkil are much more difficult for non-fluent (and possibly non-native) speakers of Arabic to read.

Help our Arabic voices: Write with tashkil!

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Listen to Wikipedia!

by Roy Lindemann on March 25, 2013 at 8:21 am 

Wikipedia logo

When it comes to developing new solutions, we focus on our current products and how to make them better but also on new ideas that sometimes become part of our portfolio. Some products become successful and others don’t get the market acceptance we thought they would. It’s a trial and error process that we have encouraged ever since starting ReadSpeaker back in 1999.

Parallel to this, we also want to try experimental stuff that we consider more as lab type projects that sit apart from our commercial products. One of the them that just went live is a new experimental way of listening to Wikipedia. We were always surprised that there has never been a readily available audio access for such a text-rich site that so many users depend on to gather knowledge. So we came up with a solution to solve this problem notably for all those that have reading disabilities. The United Nations estimates that approximately 15% or 1 billion people in the world live with some form of disability. Many of these include reading disabilities such as illiteracy and dyslexia for example. Unicef estimated that 1 billion will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names. Adding an audio version of text content also helps users with low vision, language learners or anyone who just wants to listen in addition to reading. Any simple and easy-to-use tool that can help users get better access to information is a step in the right direction.

So we decided to develop a floating audio player that Wikipedia readers can now use to listen to any English-language article (more languages could be speech-enabled in the future).

listen-to-wikipedia

The audio player is by default always on the lower right-hand side of the screen but you can move it anywhere you want. The audio player gives users several options such as switching to text mode only or keeping the page in the original layout mode. There is also a settings button which enables users to select the type of highlighting and the reading speed so as to provide an even more customizable listening and reading experience. The listen button in the panel will read the entire page. You can also choose to only listen to part of any article by simply selecting text which will trigger a pop-up Listen button.

We’d love to get your feedback on this type of approach to making Wikipedia content more easily accessible for users so please reach out to us here on our blog or on our different social feeds.

So if you want to listen to Wikipedia, try it out now!

You can easily listen to any Wikipedia article by adding the service as a bookmark.

Drag this button to your bookmarks:  Listen to Wikipedia

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The Tools of Change conference as a bellwether for change in education

by Joop Heijenrath on February 28, 2013 at 5:49 pm 

Mid February was our traditional exhibit at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference from O’Reilly.

The main theme of the conference was “Connect, Explore, Create”, which meant that there was a focus on collaborative content creation and content sharing. Several new initiatives were presented, one of which was Inkling, a rapidly developing platform that provides services for authors to create, publish and market content. These developments have the potential to change the publishing field dramatically.

It is becoming more and more clear that the shift from analog publishing to e-publishing has a major impact on all entities in the publishing value chain. The rapid rise of tablets in education creates momentum for this massive shift. This opens the door for new technologies to be applied, which were unheard of in the analogue era. Technologies that perfectly fit into the Universal Design of Learning. One of these technologies is text to speech. Text to speech enhances the learning experience and it able to provide learners with a multi-modal possibility to receive the content. Such multiple representations not only ensure that information is accessible to learners with particular sensory and perceptual disabilities, but also easier to access and comprehend for many others.

It is always good to see that conferences like ToCCon provide a perspective on these new developments in educational publishing. Given the interest in our services by the major publishers, we believe that the rapid growth of technology in the classroom is not coming to an end any time soon.

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Plugins and You

by Andreas Persson on February 15, 2013 at 2:34 pm 

Content Management Systems (CMS) are becoming more and more popular. This is mainly due to the fact that they lower development costs and make content generation a lot easier and more efficient than how it was done in the past. With millions of users around the world using CMSs for their website and with the huge communities that support them, there will always be people available to help you if you get stuck while working with it. This is especially true if you use one of the many open source CMSs that are available on the market.

Since there are a lot of people who use them and there is a lot of support available for the administrators/developers, this creates an ideal position for us. A position where we are able to help our customers with their implementations in a way that wasn’t possible before. The large spread of these systems and the way they are coded allows us to create packages of our products in the form of plugins or modules that our customer can, in turn, use to automatically implement our products on their website. After that, all that’s needed is some minor configuration and then they have ReadSpeaker implemented! All in just a few short minutes. This does not only make implementation easier, but it also helps to further reduce implementation costs.

Think about it for a moment. Web agencies often charge a lot, even for the smallest changes. Wouldn’t it be more efficient if you could implement ReadSpeaker yourself in a short amount of time and save that money? Especially when it’s done in such a fashion that anyone could do the installation? Time is money, and if you are using a common CMS, you can save on both.

We currently support a number of CMSs for each of our products. The main ones are Joomla, WordPress and Drupal, while we also have plugins for Moodle and EpiServer. For example, here is a short list of our most recent plugins for the new version of Enterprise Highlighting:

  • EpiServer
  • Drupal 7
  • Joomla 1.5
  • Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5/3.0
  • WordPress 2.x/3.x
  • Moodle 2.4

These all work out-of-the-box in a vanilla installation of each CMS but may in some cases require a few modifications in order to fit your theme or template.

Are you using a CMS that is not in the list above? Fear not! Custom plugins can be ordered from us if it is an Open Source system that is well documented (and has support for external modules/plugins). Contact us for more information.

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Why should I use online text to speech on my website or mobile app?

by Roy Lindemann on February 7, 2013 at 10:36 am 

web accessibility word cloud

That is a question – surprise, surprise – we get asked from our prospects! The context of this question can come from various angles:

  • I have made my web site accessible so why the need for a web-based audio version of it?
  • Visitors to my web site can download text-to-speech software that will read any content so why bother?

In terms of accessibility, we encourage and are supportive of engaging all our customers to make their web content accessible. That starts with looking at the code of their web sites and making sure it is in line with international or national accessibility guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 from the W3C. Once the web content is accessible, assistive technologies can be used efficiently because the right markup will have been put into place. Assistive technologies will only work as well as the quality of the foundation they are being used on. ReadSpeaker works better when the web content is accessible. It’s a virtuous circle and there is no debate there. The WCAG 2.0 in its third principle about making information and the operation of user interface understandable actually refers to alternative technologies such as ours:

3.1.5 Reading Level: When text requires reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level after removal of proper names and titles, supplemental content, or a version that does not require reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level, is available. (Level AAA).

We have referred in this blog at how many people across the globe have limited reading skills and for who supplemental content such as the audio version of a Web page does provide a solution to access online written content.

However many users will not invest in assistive technologies because they don’t have the same need to do that than others for who it is a must-have to be able to access content. Assistive technologies such as a screen readers are needed by blind users to access all web content and software applications they use, not only content available from the browser. On the contrary, take the example of a child who is learning English as a second language and who would like to listen to online courses to improve his or her skills. Take the case of a user with a mobile device for who it just might be more convenient at some times to listen to online news than to read it on a smaller screen. Or what about the multitasker who can listen to online updates while working on something else.  This temporary type of usage will not need the investment – sometimes costly for the end user – in assistive technologies. In this case, it is the content owner’s responsibility to find solutions that will easily benefit their users’ needs.

This leads me to the second point made at the beginning of this post regarding downloading software instead of using online text to speech solutions like ours. We believe in the two words content owner. The owner of a web site, or mobile app, should be in control of how his or her information is communicated and delivered. With our speech services, web content owners can decide exactly how they want their online text to be read aloud. They can customize the reading experience for their users in the best way possible. That is not possible if they rely on their end users to access their content with text-to-speech software.

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