“The Annual Report Awards epitomise the work of IPAA by providing agencies with an opportunity to be assessed on their annual report accountability, encouraging excellence and good governance in public administration,” said Mr Metcalfe, President of the IPAA ACT and Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. The Annual Report Awards are open to all Australian government and ACT government agencies and bodies.

The AIHW is the national agency set up to provide information and statistics on Australia’s health and welfare.The AIHW was established as a statutory authority in 1987 by the Australian Institute of Health Act 1987 to report to the nation on the state of its health. In 1992, the role and functions of the then Australian Institute of Health were expanded to include welfare related information and statistics, making it the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

You can listen to the annual report which won the award and which uses our most popular product ReadSpeaker Enterprise Highlighting.

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The speech-enabling solution chosen by INSEE allows visitors of its website to instantly listen to written content via a listen button positioned near the text to read. When the user clicks on the listen button, ReadSpeaker immediately begins to read the content of the page. The text is also simultaneously highlighted, reinforcing a better understanding of the content. The vocal support enables all visitors, notably  those with reading disabilities, to access the audio version of the website without having to download any software or plugin.

ReadSpeaker has been added on certain pages of the INSEE website with more pages to come in the following weeks.

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“With our new web service, the users of the National Council of Monaco website can now benefit from an immediate, simple and convenient access to its audio version,” said Roy Lindemann, ReadSpeaker Cofounder.

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The new text-to-speech technology is now available to the growing number of libraries that subscribe to Literati Public, the SIIA CODiE 2013 winner for Best General Reference Service. Text to speech will soon be added to Literati Academic, a CODiE award finalist for Best Education Reference Solution, as well as to Literati School and Literati Student Athlete, which were both launched earlier this year.

“At Credo, we’re focused on making authoritative information accessible to all users. Text to speech removes barriers for auditory learners, learners who are visually impaired and those who are learning English as a second language,” said Carol Helton, Credo’s Executive Vice President of Marketing and Customer Solutions. “ReadSpeaker pioneered online text to speech in 1999, so we are very excited to leverage their experience, expertise and technologies to make Literati an even stronger solution for libraries and the diverse user base that they serve.”

“Literati is unique in that it helps individuals hone information skills that transfer beyond the classroom to the workplace and everyday life,” said Joop Heijenrath, ReadSpeaker Cofounder and responsible for ReadSpeaker’s business operations. “We are proud to partner with Credo to enhance Literati and support such an important mission.”

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Patient.co.uk

Visitors to Patient.co.uk now have the option to listen to the site’s award-winning clinical health information pages. Accredited by The Information Standard (the Department of Health’s quality mark), these 4000+ pages provide patients, health professionals and the general public with trusted medical information and support.

The technology, powered by ReadSpeaker, helps improve the user experience for people with visual impairments, reading difficulties, or learning disabilities as well as those whose native language is different from that of the website.

This new feature is immediately available to all users with no additional software to download or install. They simply click and listen to the content of their choice.

Ben Foster, Patient.co.uk Operations Director said: “We work hard to make the site accessible to a wide audience and for all users and technologies. Implementing the ‘listen’ function is an innovative way of extending the service, enabling users to have the page read aloud to them.”

Joop Heijenrath, ReadSpeaker Co-founder and responsible for ReadSpeaker’s business operations, said: “Increasing access to vital information is one of the reasons we strive to make our text-to-speech functionality such an affordable and user-friendly service. We are pleased to provide Patient.co.uk’s users with an easy way to listen to the site’s quality health information.”

Patient.co.uk was recently listed as the ‘Number 1 health website you can’t live without’ by The Times and also received a Highly Commended Award from the British Medical Association in the BMA Patient Information Awards 2012.

The post Patient.co.uk provides greater access to its health information by adding ReadSpeaker’s leading text-to-speech technology appeared first on ReadSpeaker.

ReadSpeaker’s “click & listen” feature enables all K-5 students using ScootPad’s platform to instantaneously listen to the math and reading practice questions & answers. Hearing the questions, and having each word (and/or sentence) visually highlighted at the same time, helps students improve word recognition skills and vocabulary, as well as improved reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and concentration.

ReadSpeaker makes online educational content more accessible to students with cognitive issues, learning difficulties, and/or vision problems. ReadSpeaker’s online text-to-speech solutions also help students who use English as a second language. Additionally, it provides multitasking opportunities for learners and portability of content to other devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

“We’re excited to partner with ReadSpeaker to seamlessly enable voice support on ScootPad across any device. The read-aloud feature has been valuable in enhancing vocabulary and comprehension for students in lower grades (K & 1^st), English Language Learners (ELL) and those with special education needs.” said Bharat Kumar, ScootPad Cofounder & CEO.

“We are thrilled to be part of ScootPad’s growing platform. Adding text-to-speech capabilities to ScootPad’s math and reading lessons helps all of their K-5 students better understand, perform and succeed. The ReadSpeaker audio and highlighting features that ScootPad now offers, brings a new, useful and fun approach to learning,” said Joop Heijenrath, ReadSpeaker Cofounder and responsible for ReadSpeaker’s business operations.

The post ScootPad integrates ReadSpeaker’s leading text-to-speech technology into its learning platform appeared first on ReadSpeaker.

Support for ePub, PowerPoint, and Excel documents has been added. ReadSpeaker docReader can now provide document reading for the following formats:

• ePub (.epub)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.pps, .ppt, .pptx)
• Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
• OpenOffice/OpenDocument Presentation (.odp)
• OpenOffice/OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)
• OpenOffice/OpenDocument Text (.odt)
• Portable Document Format (.pdf)

New languages have been added, such as Faroese and Arabic. Text can now be read either left to right, right to left, or both directions if a document has text in both a left-to-right language and a right-to-left language and if the chosen voice is able to handle mixed languages.

We have added more support for untagged documents. We recommend tagging all online documents for accessibility purposes, but in cases where a document is untagged, ReadSpeaker docReader will try to guess the structure of the document.

Finally, we have added or improved several back-end features for faster and more efficient document processing and reading.

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TechFund has been involved in this company since 2008 and was genuinely excited by the opportunity to support ReadSpeaker to the next stage of their growth. ReadSpeaker is the worldwide leader in online text to speech technology. The company started with a speech-enabling application for websites only and developed during the last years several solutions and tools, backed by the capital and support of TechFund. Due to the lifecycle and strategy of the Fund to support companies to the next level, the time and moment seemed perfect to offer ReadSpeaker’s management the opportunity to buy the shares of TechFund.

Today, ReadSpeaker’s web-based text to speech services are used by thousands of websites / mobile apps and millions of users worldwide every month. ReadSpeaker’s management has the experience, energy, resources and people to lead the business into the next stage of growth without the support of TechFund.

Both TechFund’s fundmanagement and the management of ReadSpeaker are proud to make this announcement, acknowledging what has been accomplished thus far, and looking forward to all the goals that will be attained in the coming years.

“ReadSpeaker is well positioned to grow to the next level”, say Joop Heijenrath en Staffan Meij, co-founders and directors of the company. “TechFund’s financial and hands-on support during the first phase has been of crucial importance to the successful growth of ReadSpeaker. The company has transformed from a technology start-up to a leading global online software-as-a-service provider, active in more than 40 countries. With growth in all continents and its own subsidiaries in 9 countries, it is looking forward to rapid deployment across the globe. We are excited to offer TechFund the opportunity to exit, whilst we look forward to continue our growth in the years to come.”  say Meij and Heijenrath.

The post TIIN CAPITAL sells shares in ReadSpeaker to the Company’s Management appeared first on ReadSpeaker.

“We are always looking at ways to help as many fans as possible access our news. ReadSpeaker is a wonderful and innovative service that enables us to reach out to all those fans that would like to have the option to listen to our web content. ReadSpeaker’s web hosted service was extremely easy to implement and converts our news updates into high quality audio on the go”, said Simone Freling, Director Ajax Foundation.

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