I have used screen readers myself, and often sit on public transport listening to reports and articles I never otherwise find the time to read through. Audio screen reader apps are increasingly useful for mobile and tablet access, it being hard work for someone who has difficulty reading the equivalent of 'license plates for bumble bees' that the small screen offers, especially to someone who is too vain to use their reading glasses on the bus.
Properly up to date "how to" guides for the better screen readers currently available, along with projects to improve how our articles and image pages should be tagged in ways that improve screen reader navigation, would probably be more practical to benefit a wide community of readers rather than having a standard button. Fae On 25 January 2015 at 12:35, Andrew Gray <andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk> wrote: > Max Klein and I had a chat with someone from a similar group a couple > of years ago, and he reported much the same thing - the actual site > structure is pretty good for screenreaders and similar software, or > was in early 2013. > > (His main suggestion was to look into improved audio "materials" - > recordings of what things sounds like, soundscapes, etc. - which we > don't really do much with. Andy Mabbett picked up part of this with > the Voice Intro Project, which is great, but the rest is still fertile > ground...) > > Anecdotally, I believe the "spoken Wikipedia" article recordings are > mainly used as surrogates for podcast-type use, rather than > accessibility purposes. However, if anyone has some firm numbers on > this (or even an indication of how much they're used at all...) I'd > love to know about it! > > Andrew. > > > On 25 January 2015 at 12:00, Tomasz Ganicz <polime...@gmail.com> wrote: >> 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 <jmh...@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 >>> >>> 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> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz >> http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek >> http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ >> http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz >> _______________________________________________ >> 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> > > > > -- > - Andrew Gray > andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk > > _______________________________________________ > 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> -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ 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>
