I'm always glad to see organizations, particularly those in the open
source movement, producing products for the visually impaired. However,
with this I'm not sure I see the point. If I already have a screen
reader, what's the benefit of having a Wikipedia page verbally spoken to
me? If I don't have a screen reader, how am I going to even access the
article I'm looking for in the first place? Still, from
GlobalAccessibilityNews ...
Wikipedia developing crowdsourced speech engine for users with vision
disabilities
Europe Mar 15, 2016
Wikipedia and Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology are working on
a crowdsourced speech engine that will make the online encyclopedia more
accessible to users who are blind or have low vision.
See caption
Swedish, English and Arabic will be the first languages launched on
Wikipedia’s synthesised speech platform. (Photo: David Callahan)
The platform will be optimised for Wikipedia but freely available as
open source, and readily usable by any site that uses the MediaWiki
software on which Wikimedia is based.
Joakim Gustafson, a professor of Speech Technology at KTH, says that the
project aims to provide access to Wikipedia and other wikis to people
with reading or vision disabilities.
“Initially our focus will be on Swedish language, where we will make use
of our own language resources,” Gustafson says. “Then we will do a basic
English voice, which we expect to be quite good given the large amount
of open source linguistic resources. And finally, we will do a
rudimentary Arabic voice, that will be more a proof of concept.”
An estimated 25 percent of all Wikipedia users — nearly 125 million
people per month — need or prefer text in spoken form, according to
Wikimedia Sweden.
Like Wikipedia’s content, the speech output will be crowdsourced, with
users contributing to the continuous development of the synthesizer.
Once the English, Swedish and Arabic speech engines are produced,
sometime about September 2017, it will be possible with the help of
users to extend synthesized speech to the remaining 280 languages in
which Wikipedia is available.
All material produced will be freely licensed and can be used for free
by anyone, in line with the rules of Wikimedia Commons.
The Wikispeech pilot project is a collaboration between KTH, the Swedish
Post and Telecom Authority, Wikimedia Sweden and STTS speech technology
services. PTS is financing the project.
--
David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology Specialist
Feel free to visit my Web site
WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
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