New TTS service launched to improve accessibility

18/07/2008

A new text-to-speech (TTS) solution has been launched by a UK firm in the hope of improving accessibility and helping companies to maximise the potential of their content across different platforms.

Textic's Talklets offering is claimed to be the first TTS product built as a commercial software as a service solution in the industry and requires the insertion of several lines of code into a specific page to convert that page's text into speech.

This speech takes the form of a streaming audio file that can be converted into mp3 format by users, with companies able to create "brand-specific voices" as part of the service.

As well as improving accessibility for the visually impaired, the Talklets product also holds other opportunities for businesses, said Textic chief executive Paul Ayres.

"Something like 80 per cent of the data consumed on the web is text and it's only available now if you're in front of a readable screen or if it's printed," he stated.

"Talklets is designed to extract that text and deliver it in a form that meets the increasing demand for anytime, anywhere, any device access to information."

Meanwhile, IBM recently announced the development of a new solution that makes use of social collaboration tools to help fix website accessibility flaws.