[WG: Accessibility] Adding text-to-speech support to Sakai

[Luis Fernandez]

Hello everyone,

I am the new hire in Edia, an Amsterdam based company that offers custom 
Sakai development amongst other things. We are currently investigating 
into the possibility of implementing full support for text-to-speech 
(TTS) for any Sakai instance.

Ideally it should be possible to mark-up which text must be processed by 
the TTS engine and of course be TTS engine independent. In principle 
there's no need to read-out the whole page, as things such as menu 
items, breadcrumbs and status messages might be too confusing if read 
out in the same go as the rest of the page. We would like this support 
to be compatible with existing Sakai tools if at all possible and 
provide a simple way for developers to add more fine-grained support for 
this feature in future tools.

Are there any efforts in the Sakai community in this direction already? 
Does anyone know of any existing approach to extend Sakai's 
functionality for the hearing impaired?

Any ideas are welcome.


Cheers,
Luis.

--
Luis Fernandez
Edia Educatie Technologie
w: www.edia.nl
t: +31 (0) 207163612