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

[Eli Cochran]

Hi Luis,
Welcome to the Sakai community. 

I see in your subsequent email that you discovered that Sakai has an active Accessibility Working Group. The Accessibility WG is probably the best place to start. 

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/2ACC/Accessibility+Working+Group

The Accessibility WG has regular meetings every two weeks by voice conference. Details can be found here: 
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org//x/NIDtAg. 

Our next meeting is this Thursday the 8th at 11am PST or 8pm CET (You'd better double check my time conversion. +9, right?)

Please join us so we can hear more about what you have in mind.

For the most part, Sakai is already quite usable by screen readers. We have good semantic markup, good labels, and some ARIA defined for custom controls. And we're in the QA phase on release 2.7 for which we have squashed a number of outstanding accessibility issues. 

There are still places where there could be improvement but for the most part Sakai is considered to be accessible. 

But we'd love to get more perspectives -- accessibility is an ever evolving area.

Could you explain a little more about what you would like to achieve? Is your effort primarily focused on the reading of content? 

Thanks,
Eli Cochran 



On Apr 6, 2010, at 3:27 AM, Luis Fernandez wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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Eli Cochran
manager of user experience design
ETS, UC Berkeley

"The opportunity lost by increasing the amount of blank space is gained back with enhanced attention to what remains."
    - John Maeda