Testimonials
Oman
The Sultanate of Oman’s Official eGovernment Services Portal, www.oman.om, is a gateway of e-services offered by the Omani government agencies. This portal enables citizens and residents around the world to reach government entities at any time, and from anywhere without having to physically visit the offices.
Online accessibility is a very important issue for the eGovernment Services Portal. One of the features that contributes to the sites’ accessibility is the user-friendly design which can be used comfortably by the visually challenged. Another feature that makes a large contribution to the sites’ accessibility is a listen function provided by ReadSpeaker. With the listen function people can have the content of the site read aloud in both Arabic and English.
We are trying to help people with special needs and illiterate people to access our portal easily and without having to spend money. We find that all people have the right to get access to the information provided on the portal. The listen function is an ideal way to accomplish this. Additionally, the listen function serves all people who prefer to listen instead of read.
Noor Ali Zahir Al-Hinai
Application Developer
Information Technology Authority (Sultanate of Oman)
Gale Cengage LearningGale, a part of Cengage Learning, is in the business of providing authoritative reference content to educational institutions. As such, Gale devotes considerable time to obtaining feedback from students, teachers, and researchers on how to make its offerings more accessible. One bit of feedback that Gale heard clearly was that its users wanted to be able to listen. Therefore Gale incorporated ReadSpeaker® to provide text-to-speech capabilities in its online databases, providing Gale users the ability to have content read aloud to them in addition to being able to read it.
Gale emphasizes that accessibility is far and away the primary driver behind the implementation of ReadSpeaker®.
One of the biggest things we heard from our customers was that we needed to better meet the needs of those students for whom reading text on a screen was a challenge: those at lower reading levels, those with learning disabilities, English as a second language students, and students who are visually impaired. From that feedback, we felt that making our content available with text-to-speech was the natural solution.
Read further how ReadSpeaker® helps Gale students and researchers who face a wide range of challenges - from tight schedules to visual impairments - to put the educational content to good use.
Or view the press release of Gale on their blog.
The ReadSpeaker® Listen Button offers us a very user friendly option to make our website more accessible for one of our important target groups, people with visual impairment and/or low literacy. By speech enabling our site we offer even more service to this group. ReadSpeaker® gives us a very innovative, user friendly and flexible implementation of this service.
Piet Middelkoop
Internet Consultant, Dutch Railways
SITA
We had a Q&A session with Michael Clevestig, Senior Manager Online Marketing of our customer SITA who is the world’s leading specialist in air transport communication and IT solutions. You can read about why and how SITA implemented ReadSpeaker® by going to this blog post.
At Nestlé we are constantly seeking on ways to support our corporate social responsibility strategy, which we refer to as 'Creating Shared Value'. This also includes online developments which increasingly impact how we reach out to our different constituencies. In this context, we have included on certain parts of our nestle.com website the leading speech-enabling solution ReadSpeaker® provided by VoiceCorp. With ReadSpeaker® we give all our Internet visitors including those that have reading difficulties the ability to listen to our text content using state-of-the-art synthetic voices.
All our website users can do this without having to download any software or specific plug-in, they simply need to click on the play button on top of an article to start listening to the page. By adding the ReadSpeaker® listen function to the nestle.com website we help users get free audio access to our content and making it as easy to do so as printing or emailing a web page. We are both proud and enthusiastic about this new channel we are providing to our customers.
Peter Warne
Senior Corporate Internet Manager, Nestlé SA
General Council Val de Marne
The General Council of the Val-de-Marne decided to include ReadSpeaker® when it re-worked its website so as to provide a better access to its text content. Thanks to ReadSpeaker®, we propose an excellent audio version of our Internet site. The text is converted on the fly into a near-to-human text-to-speech voice which enables us to change our text content at any time and provide the audio equivalent in real-time to all that have problems with reading such as people with visual impairments, dyslexia, foreigners, certain Seniors as well as all those that prefer to listen than to read. The implementation of ReadSpeaker® as a software as a service (SaaS) was very quick and flexible and didn’t require any re-development of our website.
Sylvie Roussel
Director of the DITAE (Online Innovation Department)
GlaxoSmithKline
GSK always wishes to propose the highest access to our online content. With ReadSpeaker® we offer a very high quality audio version of our site www.gsk.fr. The implementation was very easy and quick and the functionalities are very flexible and customisable. Our users benefit from a very useful service which requires no software or plug-in download. ReadSpeaker® speech-enables our website since October 2004.
Fabrice Vezin
Responsable Intranet/Internet
La Maison de la France
La Maison de la France decided to speech-enable its website thanks to ReadSpeaker® so as to propose a very innovative and useful service to all its visitors. The use of ReadSpeaker® is as simple as using the "Print" or "Send to" buttons. The audio quality is astonishingly human and this in the 7 languages we have used to (English, US English, Dutch, Italian, German, Spanish and French). ReadSpeaker® helps us to better communicate our information thanks to the vocal and multilingual dimension of the application. We can change our text content at each moment and ReadSpeaker® immediately converts our pages into a MP3 audio feed using the best sampled voices of the market.
Laurent Roumani
Director New Technologies
