Text to Speech on a website

[Maljonic]

I've used this pogram http://www.readplease.com/ with a partially sighted guy on his PC to read out text, it's a pretty basic set of voices but quite understandable nevertheless.

I was wondering if there was such a script (or method) that would do the same thing within a webpage, so you'd have a chunk of text with a play button on the page and it would read it out for you? I mean so it would read out any text you put on there without changing any code, not actually recording a voice saying it.

 

[Whipped]

A nice list for you http://www.laits.utexas.edu/hebrew/personal/tts/table.html

 

[Maljonic]

That was quick. Though most of those are just text to speech apps and webpage readers that you use on your desktop, I think this sounds like what I'm on about: http://www.speaksforitself.com/speaksforitself/index.asp?UID=181665862268&

Thanks.

 

[Shovel]

Talkr might be what you need, but the site seems to be down at the moment so I can't confirm that.

A number of Bloggers use it to accessify their blog posts, so I think you just link to a URL and it produces an MP3.

 

[Maljonic]

Thanks, I'll give a couple of them a go tomorrow when I go and see the guy again. I was sort of hoping there might be something that just sits there and speaks, that doesn't need to create anything like sound file.

 

[Shovel]

I was sort of hoping there might be something that just sits there and speaks, that doesn't need to create anything like sound file.

The technology doesn't really exist to do that directly, or at least server-side doesn't. Obviously a client-side speech app will just read-aloud (select some text in Opera and press 'V').

You can, I suppose, give the impression of this effect if you were to combine a service like Talkr that produces an MP3 with some kind of Flash-based media player: Like Del.icio.us does when you bookmark an MP3 file. Such that you could have a simple 'Play' button at the base of your posts. However, since this is all in the aid of accessibility, using Flash opens up a whole other can of worms. You'd be better just linking to a downloadable MP3 or better still, Podcasting the autogenerated MP3s (Talkr may even do that for you).

 

[Maljonic]

Oh right, think I'll leave it for now. Don't want to go too mad with it, the site I was thinking of adding it to is only a bt personal homepage, though he does have Flash stuff on it already. I think it would fill up his space pretty quick.

 

[Shovel]

You wouldn't necessarily need to store the MP3s on his space. I don't know what Talkr's TOS are but I'm pretty sure it works on the basis that the MP3 is hosted on their server, so your Flash player would just link to the remote resource.

That said, I'm not really sure how useful Talkr is. It's a nice thought but really anyone who needs the web reading out to them is going to have a client-side tool to do it for every website (such as Jaws or Opera or whatnot). The reverse - providing text transcripts for video/audio on a website is more important.

 

[Maljonic]

Well he's a bit of an awkward bugger sometimes to be honest, we had a look at a few ideas and he didn't like them. We installed Opera too and used the speech like you said but he didn't like the voice, or Opera, and made me delete it.

I think, as you say, he'll just use Readeplease on his PC as usual.

 

[Shovel]

Opera's isn't hugely sophisticated it has to be said. Very useful for testing though, since it's free.

The costly stuff like Jaws is probably more customisable in that respect, but I've not tried. There was a 30-day trial at one point though, if you're curious.