James Heilman wrote:
While human read articles are great they quickly become
out of date and
are available for only a fraction of our articles.
Yep.
Why don't we have a "Listen" button
beside our read button that when
clicked will read the article for the person in question?
I think this is an area where it might be difficult to know what's best to
do. A few unordered thoughts:
* We need to make sure that it's easy to distinguish between user interface
text and other text we want to ignore (noise) from page content text
(signal).
* People who really need text-to-speech tools have likely already
installed them.
* Text-to-speech may be something that's better handled at the browser or
operating system level, rather than at the Web site level.
* Even if text-to-speech isn't built into Wikimedia wikis, per se, we can
always provide help/resource pages and guides for our users. For
example, explaining how to install free text-to-speech software on
common operating systems.
* A middle-ground option might be to explore what we can do to make it
easier to programmatically distinguish signal from noise when reading a
page. This would include (better) educating developers about
accessibility concerns and educating wiki page authors about good
and bad practices (do specify alt text, don't use images for text unless
necessary, etc.). Plus there's the intersection of these two groups,
such as developers implementing simpler user interfaces that allow wiki
page authors to more easily add alt text to media. Or developers adding
the ability to specify default alt text on a per-file basis, rather than
requiring that alt text always be specified when the image is included on
a page.
* Another middle-ground option might be trying to find some integration
between text-to-speech-capable Web content and browsers. Perhaps
similar to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Edit_Button>.
There's also what I would consider a subset of text-to-speech support
(word pronunciations) that is tracked at
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T48610>.
MZMcBride