About BrowseAloud |  |
To BrowseAloud-enable your site:
| "Selecting BrowseAloud to speech enable Doña Ana County's website reflects our ongoing commitment to maintaining the standards that earned our website two national awards from the Center for Digital Government and the National Association of Counties (NACo). With this cutting edge technology, we can now make the website content available to people with learning disabilities and vision problems, as well as those for whom English is a second language, among others." Brian Haines, County Manager |
Features
- BrowseAloud is a software program that reads aloud all website content
- As you move the cursor over words, they are spoken aloud
- BrowseAloud is free to the end user
- Websites pay a yearly charge to be BrowseAloud-enabled
Benefits
Letting users have your site read out loud to them using BrowseAloud will make your site easier to use for large numbers of people.
In the US and Canada there are:
- 45+ million people with literacy problems (source :U.S. Nat'l Literacy Survey 1992)
- 10-15% of the population with a learning disability (source: National Institutes of Health)
- 18% of the population over age 5 for whom English is a second language (US Census Bureau 2002)
- 13+% of children aged 3-21 who receive special education (source: www.nces.ed.gov)
- 12% of the Canadian population with some type of disability (source: Statistics Canada)
- 22% of Canadians who are functioning at the lowest literacy level (source: Statistics Canada)
BrowseAloud-enabling your site will also help you keep up with the competition and comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act that states that all citizens must have equal access to information online (source: US Rehabilitation Act). Today, most governments (local, county, state, and federal), government agencies, and large US and Canadian companies are improving their websites' accessibility.
BrowseAloud on your site can also increase traffic and improve search engine rankings and subscriber sites are automatically added to a Member Directory of Speech-Enabled Websites.
Making your site BrowseAloud-enabled is done remotely, so you don't need to make any changes to your site. Updates to the program are handled automatically via the Texthelp servers.
Security
BrowseAloud has been designed with your website's security in mind. Making your site BrowseAloud-friendly is done remotely, so you don't need to make any changes to your site and it won't affect your website's security.
The BrowseAloud program does not connect with your web servers at any time. All text to speech processing is carried out on the visitor's own computer. All updates of the program are handled by downloads from our servers.
BrowseAloud has been rigorously tested and has Microsoft Gold Certification.
Voice-control
BrowseAloud allows the webmaster to specify how BrowseAloud reads their site, including specifying:
- The voice that will be used to read out your site.
- How the voice pronounces words
- The language used when a BrowseAloud user visits your website
Easy to do - what do I have to do to make my site BrowseAloud-enabled?
- Making your site BrowseAloud-enabled is done remotely, so you don't need to make any changes to your site
- BrowseAloud's client plug-in technology ensures a webmaster has no software to install on a webserver
- BrowseAloud is an 'immediate solution', it requires no technical changes to be made to your website if it is already designed with accessibility in mind (e.g. to W3C standards)
- We just need to be provided with the website, intranet or extranet URL. Speech-enabling your site is seamless and handled remotely, there doesn't have to be any downtime on your website and there are no management overhead costs
- BrowseAloud will be able to automatically speak new content when you update your site
