I have used screen readers myself, and often sit on public transport
listening to reports and articles I never otherwise find the time to
read through. Audio screen reader apps are increasingly useful for
mobile and tablet access, it being hard work for someone who has
difficulty reading the equivalent of 'license plates for bumble bees'
that the small screen offers, especially to someone who is too vain to
use their reading glasses on the bus.
Properly up to date "how to" guides for the better screen readers
currently available, along with projects to improve how our articles
and image pages should be tagged in ways that improve screen reader
navigation, would probably be more practical to benefit a wide
community of readers rather than having a standard button.
Fae
On 25 January 2015 at 12:35, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
Max Klein and I had a chat with someone from a similar
group a couple
of years ago, and he reported much the same thing - the actual site
structure is pretty good for screenreaders and similar software, or
was in early 2013.
(His main suggestion was to look into improved audio "materials" -
recordings of what things sounds like, soundscapes, etc. - which we
don't really do much with. Andy Mabbett picked up part of this with
the Voice Intro Project, which is great, but the rest is still fertile
ground...)
Anecdotally, I believe the "spoken Wikipedia" article recordings are
mainly used as surrogates for podcast-type use, rather than
accessibility purposes. However, if anyone has some firm numbers on
this (or even an indication of how much they're used at all...) I'd
love to know about it!
Andrew.
On 25 January 2015 at 12:00, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We were discussing it with an association of
blind people in Poland - and
they told us - that for them the most important thing is clear and logic
structure of the website - plain main text, menu/navigation in plain text
and descriptions of media in plain text. They are using their own free
text-to-speach software to which they are used to. Such software simply
reads everything on the screen in the same neutral way. So they don't need
any other tools for voice reading - if other websites provide it - they
usually do not use it. Maybe in some other languages the situation is
different - but it would be better to discuss it with relevant associations
before investing time and money for such solutions. Fortunately, Wikipedia
actually is quite text-to-speach friendly at the moment.
2015-01-24 23:21 GMT+01:00 James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com>om>:
While human read articles are great they quickly
become out of date and are
available for only a fraction of our articles.
Why don't we have a "Listen" button beside our read button that when
clicked will read the article for the person in question?
There are 37 open source text-to-speech listed here
http://www.findbestopensource.com/tagged/text-to-speech. Some of them
support up to 50 languages. This of course would require the support of the
Wikimedia Foundation.
I guess we could also do it with a gadget initially. Thoughts?
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
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http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz
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