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While human read articles are great they quickly become out of date and are available for only a fraction of our articles.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