webpage text to speech options

AHarvey · 12 Jun 2015 at 13:46

Hi all,

I've been asked to look at making some signs accessible to visual impaired people. I've images of the signs and can use windows text to speech to read it while recording it as an avi. Then hosting this online and linking to it.

However, the videos are large, look a little pap and i'm trying to make them as mobile (data) friendly as possible.

I can hope that they have a text to speech app installed on their phones and chances are they will, but does anyone know how it is possible to take a basic html page with no styling, and then get it to somehow launch the text to speech that is already built into mobiles?

lsg1r · 12 Jun 2015 at 18:03

pretty sure it's the alt tags that are read by screen readers for blind people when there are images.

This is a tool that should help check it's ok

http://wave.webaim.org/

edit: theres the free thunder screenreader as well

AHarvey · 12 Jun 2015 at 20:38

yeah screenreaders read all the text and alt images, I was just wondering what the best option would be if they didn't have a screen reader installed on their phone.

I've spent the afternoon messing around with it and managed to get a couple of ideas running.

One uses speechSynthesis.speak, this works to around 300 characters on a PC and then stops, but oddly works fine on a mobile.

The other was to launch an mp3 on page load, which worked perfectly on the desktop but doesn't on mobile.

Next step for me is to work with a mobile framework like bootstrap

lsg1r · 13 Jun 2015 at 01:02

Honestly there's probably not much you can do if they don't have a screen reader on their phone. You could argue if they don't use a screen reader then they're ok with the standard site, I suppose you could try the built in accessibility features on android if you have one and see how that responds to the pictures.

As a side note it's probably worth adding a high contrast (css file) mode might be worth adding on top of these.

At the end of the day as much as we want to help visually impaired people with viewing websites, a website is in many cases very imagery orientated and other than alt tags and verbal descriptions from screen readers you're not likely to improve it without massive overheads to the website (as you found with the video option)