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

[Richwine, Brian L]

Hi Luis,

I'm wondering about your approach. I am relatively new to the Sakai world, given that - here are some of the questions that come to my mind:

What audience of users are you targeting with this? If the Flash TTS component is focusing on the content and will not read the menus and navigation features, it would not be a complete solution for many users (those who also need tools to access to the menus, navigation, form controls, etc.). 

At our institution (Indiana University), much of the content for the students to read is provided in PDF, Word Documents, PowerPoint Presentations, etc. and the user would need a tool giving them access that content as well if they are not supported by the Flash TTS component. 

Will the Flash TTS component read multiple languages? 

Does the integration work the Flash TTS component needs come from following recognized standards such as the W3C's WCAG 2, WAI-ARIA, or HTML 5? I'm concerned that if a special API would be needed just for this tool, that designers/developers might stop at supporting the Flash TTS component's special API thinking that accessibility "had been handled" and then neglect other issues needed to support broader accessibility concerns covered by the standards.

Getting broad and consistent support across all of the tools would seem to be quite a challenge. This makes me wonder, is the Flash TTS component going to be free and open source? Who will maintain the Flash TTS component if it got adopted?

-Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: accessibility-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:accessibility-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Eli Cochran
Sent: Monday, April 12, 2010 12:58 PM
To: Luis Fernandez
Cc: accessibility at collab.sakaiproject.org WG
Subject: Re: [WG: Accessibility] [Building Sakai] Adding text-to-speech support to Sakai

Luis,
Very interesting approach.

Reading content (and skipping the navigation and application elements of the page) is an interesting use-case. I suspect that there are ways to solve this problem using standard techniques with out resorting to a Flash plug-in. 

(By the way, Flash plug-ins are notoriously tricky to make accessible. It is do-able but you really have to know your stuff. Adobe has lots of documentation on this but it's not always easy to figure it all out.) 

I do feel that you're approaching this problem from the wrong direction, but maybe I'm just not "getting it" and others see the utility.

- Eli 

  
On Apr 12, 2010, at 1:33 AM, Luis Fernandez wrote:

> Hello Eli,
> 
> Thanks for your informative reply. I couldn't make it to the conference call last Thursday.
> 
> Let me explain a little more about what we are trying to do. We are trying to integrate a Flash TTS component and make it available through an entire Sakai instance, including all existing tools (in as much as this is possible). This Flash component loads on every pageview and gets fed the text through an interface that we are defining with the vendor, the reader has the capability of highlighting the text as it reads it out.
> 
> We would like to read the page's full-text without browsing elements, menu items, etc. We would also like to have a means to select the content that gets read and the order. Perhaps have read-out instructions that are not part of the page's content such as "press the space bar to pause this read-out" or something to that effect, but this is just an idea.
> 
> I'm not an accessibility expert, so I'm not sure if this is the right approach to this problem or if the questions I am asking are ill-directed.
> 
> Kind regards,
> Luis.
> 
> 
> On 4/6/10 6:18 PM, Eli Cochran wrote:
>> 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> sakai-dev mailing list
>>> sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
>>> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-dev
>>> 
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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
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> --
> Luis Fernandez
> Edia Educatie Technologie
> w: www.edia.nl
> t: +31 (0) 207163612
> 

. . . . . . . . . . .  .  .   .    .      .         .              .                     .

Eli Cochran
user interaction developer
ETS, UC Berkeley


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