On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 12:19 PM Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
Hear the articles
Not sure that duplicating the work of a range of screen readers is the best use of our resources.
I agree; such functionality belongs in the user client (screen reader, browser, whatever), not in the subject website.
Then again, even some newspapers, like Haaretz and the New York Times, nowadays give you a "Listen to this article" option on their sites, and it is, frankly, nice to have sometimes.
Haaretz uses Trinity Audio. This is an excerpt from the marketing text on Trinity Audio's website:
*A publisher that isn’t excited or scared, is asleep at the wheel.*
*We’re living in exciting times of an exponential audio technology revolution. Remember how not long ago people didn’t have mobile phones? Or internet? In the blink of an eye it’s become impossible to imagine life before the eruption of such technologies. The rate of change is growing so fast that in a matter of months it’ll be inconceivable for publishers to offer an experience of reading alone. Just as offering print only solutions is a thing of the past.*
Obviously, this is a self-serving marketing effort, but there's no question that perceptions of what is the "normal" way of delivering or consuming text is rapidly changing. YouTube now offers automatic subtitling/transcript generation, for example. Machine translation is becoming better and better and ever more commonplace. And we all know that many times when a user comes across Wikipedia content, it is delivered by a voice assistant in audio format.
The New York Times, meanwhile, has "a new app for audio journalism and storytelling" in beta ...
https://www.nytimes.com/marketing/audio/beta?channel=oaudio
Andreas