For the first time, this type of news will send an alarm bell to the ears of the decision makers and provide a concrete point of reference for accessibility experts to make their case without having to dig into theoretical guidelines and reports. I think that lessons will be learned and that this could be a turning point for many other major company web sites to think twice before launching or updating web sites and taking into account all the added benefits of giving equal access to their online content.

It is of course important to use best practice methods when trying to implement accessibility advice but once in a while an an agreement like the one Target and the NFB have made is a very good awakener.

1. Networking
2. More networking
3. Inspiration 
4. Getting up to date with the development around the world
5. The parties!

Time to go again. I am attending the Web2.0 Expo in New York together with my colleague and co-blogger Mr. Roy Lindemann. If you want to meet any of us for a chat, please get in touch!

I was present at the conference in Riga in 2006 that followed after the MINISTERIAL DECLARATION was signed by all current member states. Paragraph number 25 declared that: “Promoting and ensuring accessibility of all public web sites by 2010, through compliance with the relevant W3C common web accessibility standards and guidelines.” The commissioner on Information, Society and Media, Viviane Reding said in her Key note speech in Riga that she will pull the ears of the ministers that didn’t realize the whole content of the declaration

In this press release she says that: “Access to internet websites is essential for many citizens in Europe, yet many simply cannot use them because of disabilities. As long as web accessibility for all is not a reality, many people miss out on the benefits of the Internet. There are such simple solutions to these issues – so why is it that so few web publishers actually implements them?” asks Viviane Reding in the press release. “The more people use the internet, the better for Europe’s economy and the richer becomes online content. I call on the web publishing industry and public sector administrations to make a much more determined effort to ensure the web is accessible to everyone. Those responsible should remember that in a few years time, they will probably find themselves amongst those having trouble to read the screen.”

But as the commission express slightly bitterly further on in the press release: “Despite repeated calls by the EU and government leaders to improve this situation, progress remains limited: by far the majority of websites fail to use universally accepted user-friendly solutions.”

There are just 17 months left until year 2010 and YES there are still a LOT inaccessible websites and information out there.

But this is a good and clear message from the Commission. And it is of course extra nice when they count speech-enabling of text as one of three “Web accessibility solutions”.

And since they are also a ReadSpeaker customer it gets super nice when they in the press release tell people to click on the speaker icon next to the headline at http://ec.europa.eu/roaming to test a “screen reader”.

ReadSpeaker is not a traditional screen reader (like “Jaws” that is usually used by visually impaired) but it does read the main text content that is displayed on the screen.

For more information see:

• EUs policy on web accessibility
• Viviane Redings homepage at the website of the EU
• Thematic portal of Europe’s Information Society

VoiceCorp has done it again! The official website for the City of San Francisco is one of the latest web sites to make their content more accessible by adding the ReadSpeaker read-aloud text-to-speech service to their web pages. Most of the pages on the website now have a ”Listen” button in the tool bar right next to the ”Print”, ”Text Only” and ”Font size” functions. Listen for yourself at http://www.sfgov.org/site/mayor_index.asp

But what about the private corporate sector? We are starting to see an evolution here with an increasing amount of household names contacting us and asking us what speech-enabling their web sites could help them achieve. One of the interesting trends here is that some of these companies see an audio version of their web content as part of their overall corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since more and more of their corporate information is published online, these companies are considering the impact that this could have on all those customers, partners, employees that for some reason would prefer to listen to this information rather than reading it. The most recent example of this type of behaviour comes from a world-wide leading luxury and retail group which we are unfortunately not allowed to name. We asked them the straight forward question why they wanted to provide a speaking version of their web site? The answer was not only did they want to make their content as accessible as possible to a maximum amount of visitors to their web site but that this was also part of a bigger general reflection on how they were trying to increase their CSR in all the different aspects of their day-to-day operations. Of course, the more visible parts of a CSR strategy are for example to foster employee volunteering programs or taking part in environmental actions but it is noteworthy to see that the web is now also part of this overall reasoning. At the end of the day, CSR whether it is done offline or online is all about reaching beyond purely business objectives and making the world a better place to live in no?

Niclas

The pictures shows two robots. The left one is an industrial robot from ABB that probably is used to build cars or something similar. The right one is one of the most advanced AI robots that can be found today. It is possible to converse with it and it is very human like.

Both robots serve their purpose and do it well. And it is the same with speech syntheses.

When we launched the first speaking web services back in 2001 the only available voices was very robotic ones and became kind of boring listening to on longer texts. Today we use voices made in a complete different technique and the quality become closer and closer to recorded speech.

But the thing is that the older voices is still used by a lot of people and is even preferred compared to the newer ones for some purposes. For example people with visual impairment often prefer the older voices for screen-reading software’s like Jaws. The reason is that the older voices are more consequent on how they read the text and you can get used to the odd and robotic character of the voice. The older voices also read out the text in a more detailed way. The voices we use today are a lot more human like but also more “forgiving” when it comes to spelling errors and some words from foreign languages etc. The secret behind that is many times bigger database with the phonemes.

We know that the smaller need a person have for a synthetic speech, the harder judge he/she will be. We who doesn’t have reading difficulties or visual impairment can see/read the text and compare that to the voice speaking. Then we react on every little slight error in the pronouncing by the synthesis.

We put a lot of effort to make the reading as good as possible by making a lot of customizations so that the speech syntheses pronounce the current website’s vocabulary as good as possible. Because we know that there is a strong connection between how good it sounds and how many people that will use the service.

Back to the robots again: They might both serve their purposes well. But I guess it would be an easy choice which one you would pick to serve visitors at the reception desk, right?

Scan, one of the leading Swedish brands just launched a really great viral marketing campaign using VoiceCorps SpeechMachine solution. The idea for the campaign is quite cool. The campaign is for marketing Scan’s new line of spicy sausages. They wanted to add some nice interaction with the user so they added the strongest media around. Speech.

The core functionalty is that the users can send “speech-cards” to each other. They enter the text, listens if it is good and send the speech card to a friend.

The cool thing is that we used a Spanish voice but using Swedish speech rules. The result is a Spanish guy speaking Swedish. It’s brilliant! It really sounds like a guy from Spain that only lived a few years in Sweden. Enough time to learn the language but keeping a strong Spanish accent. The speech solution itself was delivered in just a couple of hours thanks to SpeechMachines ability to integrate with all the TTS engines on the market.

SpeechMachine is provided by VoiceCorp as a 100% hosted service that allows creative web developers to easily add text-to-speech functionality to their web apps without requiring any knowledge about text-to-speech technology. The communication with the customer’s web based app and the SpeechMachine is based on standard HTTP requests, and is therefore really easy to integrate in any web app.

Want to try out the app, http://www.scan.se/kryddigakorvar/