[Wikimedia-l] A Listen Button
While human read articles are great they quickly become out of date and are available for only a fraction of our articles.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 The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] A Listen Button
Hi James, Thanks for this suggestion. May I suggest that you post this idea in IdeaLab? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab Siko, cc'd here, might be able to help advise about possible development of this proposal. Thanks, Pine On Jan 24, 2015 2:21 PM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: While human read articles are great they quickly become out of date and are available for only a fraction of our articles.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 The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] A Listen Button
Okay have gone ahead and started a proposal here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_%22Listen%22_Button J On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 9:08 PM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: Yes if there is no opposition to the idea I will post it to the IdeaLab. Thanks Pine :-) J On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Hi James, Thanks for this suggestion. May I suggest that you post this idea in IdeaLab? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab Siko, cc'd here, might be able to help advise about possible development of this proposal. Thanks, Pine On Jan 24, 2015 2:21 PM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: 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 The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] A Listen Button
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 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] A Listen Button
Il 24/Gen/2015 23:21 James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com ha scritto: 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? (only marginally related, but this is to say that I like this idea) A couple of years ago I contacted a professor at the University of Siena (Tuscany, Italy) which was the head of a project that built a text-to-sign-language converter. The software was converting text in Italian to LIS (Lingua Italiana dei Segni, Italian Sign Language) and was tested also on the public television (see the website below). The software is called Blue Sign: http://www.bluesign.it/ Basically, since the website said that the project was over, I asked them to re-release the code with a free/libre open license which is a precondition to use it on Wikipedia. Despite some initial interest in the end the professor told me that it was too complicated to contact every author (actually an handful of people) to obtain their permission, so in the end this resulted in nothing :(. Cristian ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] A Listen Button
Yes if there is no opposition to the idea I will post it to the IdeaLab. Thanks Pine :-) J On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Hi James, Thanks for this suggestion. May I suggest that you post this idea in IdeaLab? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab Siko, cc'd here, might be able to help advise about possible development of this proposal. Thanks, Pine On Jan 24, 2015 2:21 PM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: 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 The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
