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While human read articles are great they quickly become out of date and are available for only a fraction of our articles.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