Or rather, why should you offer text to speech software on your site?

Generally, the reason is given ‘to make the site more accessible to people with disabilities’. This is usually the model that companies who produce TTS software use to try and persuade people to use their product.

Some forms of text to speech software are used on a per-PC basis: these translate elements of the user’s desktop, open applications and suchlike to synthesised speech. These are generally termed screen readers as, basically, they read out what is on the screen.

The other sort of text to speech software works on a specific application, or a specific site. This is the sort of software which is frequently offered to large companies to make their individual website more accessible — products include Dixerit Plus, Browsealoud and Talklets.

Simplistically, people assume that TTS software is helpful to people who are blind and cannot otherwise read the website. This is generally not the case. Someone who cannot see your website at all will generally not benefit from this sort of TTS software, because if it is only on your site (and a few other limited sites), then generally they won’t be able to find your site in the first place, unless they had some form of TTS software already available on their PC – the classic ‘screen reader’.

The assumption is sometimes made therefore that the companies offering these products are therefore pulling a fast one — if someone needs text to speech software to access your site, they would already have it, or they would not be on your site in the first place.

This is wrong. Site-based text to speech software may be of minimal benefit to someone who can’t see at all, but there are an awful lot of situations where this sort of facility is useful…

• People with english as a second language
• People with poorer literacy
• People with dyslexia
• People with poor vision

In short, people who have been able to locate your site in the first place, and possibly have managed to cope with the site navigation, but who would benefit from having the (generally denser) body text read out to them.

Obviously, all of these sorts of problems can be alleviated by using simpler language, larger text (providing the facility to adjust text sizes or giving the users information as to how to adjust their browser settings), the use of sans-serif fonts, not right-justifying text and so on, but these groups will benefit from text to speech software.

I was prompted into thinking about this again recently because I was pointed towards an article which said:

…software should be able to read the content of any web page: we already know that search engines can do it, so why not text-to-speech software?

The simple answer is that Texthelp Systems could if they wanted develop their system to work on any site, and use the site’s CSS to better read the page, but they probably make far too much money from encouraging web developers to make their sites Browsealoud-enabled

Blue Milkshake: Browsealoud Doesn’t Play Ball

Now, so far as I am aware, these products are all licenced in approximately the same way: the site owner pays for it; then the service is offered (via different mechanisms) to visitors free of charge. As Mark of Blue Milkshake points out, because the product is not free to adopt, developers who otherwise follow W3C standards are not able to offer these services to their users without paying, whereas if it was free for the developers to offer, many more sites would offer it, so the users of the software would actually benefit more.

Of course, the problem with this is the business model: these companies need some sort of revenue-earning mechanism, and this particular mechanism means that the product is free to the user with dyslexia, poorer literacy etc, and it is the company who pay on behalf of all of their users. In addition, those with poorer literacy or English as a second language may simply not know about assistive technology — so a service immediately available on the website will benefit these people who possibly otherwise may have simply had to struggle on.

It’s not perfect, because the cost involved will mean that some sites who would offer the solution if it was free to the site owners — thus providing a benefit to anyone using the product — will simply not use it because they cannot afford, or cannot justify the cost.

For small users, small sites, the cost may well be prohibitive or off-putting. For larger corporate entities (and particularly for public bodies), the benefits of being able to offer a service that makes things easier for people with dyslexia, or otherwise little written English, may well make the cost worthwhile.

And that is what you have to weigh up before deciding whether or not you want to offer such a service. Not the costs vs. ‘people with visual disabilities’, it’s costs vs. ‘people with written english difficulties’.