Ready, set, Odiogo
One of the most popular assistive technology features we’ve been asked about in recent years is the ability to convert text to downloadable audio files on the fly. Now there’s Odiogo, a free, mainstream service that does the same thing for “news sites and blog posts.” Great for anyone who prefers audio format or who benefits from simultaneous reading and listening. The only drawback is that it’s not controllable by the end user; instead, the website owner has to sign up for it.
Working?: (IE)Nine to (HTML)Five
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) tested support for HTML5 among commonly-used browsers, and found that Internet Explorer 9 does the overall best job. However, these results are not entirely consistent with the accessibility-focused review of HTML5 being done by the Paciello Group (which gives the nod to the current Firefox beta), and some accessibility items seem to not be covered in the W3C testing. La luta continua.
The Register: First official HTML5 tests topped by…Microsoft
Still better Windows text-to-speech
Balabolka adds new features to free text-to-speech for Windows. You can import all kinds of files, set the voice characteristics you want, change the speed and emphasis, etc., then export the results as audio files, say for an mp3 player. Note that this is not a screen reader — it’s a utility for producing better-than-average synthetic speech for almost any text you have.
Balabolka Enhances Windows Text-to-Speech with Reading Styles and Audio Export
Diminished Reality
We’ve covered augmented reality interfaces, where a video image is superimposed with additonal content, such as the history of a building your camera is pointed at. Now researchers at the Technische Universität in Ilmenau, Germany are going the other way — removing objects from the camera’s output, in real time. This might work well as a wayfinding interface for people with low vision or cognitive disabilities. Imagine a street scene with all the signs still there, but none of the bustling, distracting people. Like a 10 megapixel neutron bomb.
Gizmodo: Magic Software Eliminates Objects From Reality Itself
Directions For Me
Small-footprint CCTV-type devices are blooming all over to provide people with visual disabilities magnified or audio access to product labels. However, this may be an involved process, especially if the labels are located in odd places–no one wants to be crawling all over a mattress, for example, just to get a shot of the “Do not remove under penalty of having bedbugs sprinkled in your hair” tag. Enter Directions For Me, a website that lists the product label information for food, health and beauty products, and a miscellaneous set of other consumables. This lets anyone pull up relevant product information on a smartphone or tablet during or even before their shopping trip. Buyer paradise? Well, yes, if Horizons for the Blind, the sponsoring non-profit, has continued funding to add, modify, or delete information on a regular basis. Fingers firmly crossed.
Sync and swim
YouTubeSocial is a website that lets you load a video and notify all your pals so they can watch it along with you, IM-ing all the while. Anyone else thinkin’ this could be a great tool for providing on-the-fly real-time captioning?
Gizmodo: The simplest way to watch cute YouTube videos in sync with friends
Cloudy captions
Online captions make videos accessible to people with hearing or language disabilities, and make content indexing and searching possible for everyone. There are more than a few online captioning tools. But SpeakerText is a bit different. It uses speech recognition and human transcribers to provide text at $2 a minute plus your volume-based monthly fee, with a turnaround of 48 hours. It stores the synchronized transcript in the cloud, and loads a player when people visit the video on your site, with additional features like search and quote. A good price for an innovative service that may help captions go even more mainstream.
SpeakerText Builds the Missing Text Layer for Online Video [Invites]