Spoken Text…How Cool Is This…
Last November, 2007, my company launched an initiative, Sustainable Construction, and I was so proud with the way everything turned out. The book and the website looked great. Then I presented it to someone with visual difficulties. This is not to say that the person was blind, they just had difficulties reading the small letters on websites. When designers want something to look sexy, they don’t really care about people with seeing difficulties, and font size of 8, or 10, may look good, but is not easily readable for people with a visual problem.
So, I did some research and found, among others, Spoken Text.Net, and I really couldn’t believe the voice reproduction quality. Listen to this text buy clicking the MP3 Icon at the end of this article. I think it’s great.
I think Spoken Text.net will have to resolve their business model, as making the recordings available for just 7 days doesn’t make sense. Nevertheless, it’s a great platform, which I will try to see how I can support and utilise in the future.
I did wonder if a similar platform for sign language was being worked on somewhere in the world? I asked about this in Portugal, but nothing going on here.
Hi Ken
I am glad you liked the site.
In your blog post you mention our business model and that 7 days is not enough time. You can now get a SpokenText Plus account for only a donation of $30 per year. Which lets you upload 20mb files and makes your recordings last for 365 days.
I need to make this more prominent on the site. But as yet have not had the time too do it.
Today I just added 3 mew voices 2 British English (John, Lister) voices and a Spanish voice (Antonio). The last two voices are not the best but some users might find them useful.
Cheers,
Mark