Talking the Talk
To an extent, that's already the case. More and more websites are incorporating video, and what one friend calls "creepy little people," those announcer-types who walk onto your desk top and act cute on certain websites. Mostly, it has proven to be hype. Kind of cute the first time you see it, extremely annoying the fifth, twelfth, and hundredth.
Talklets wants to take it to a new level.
What is Talklets? As the developers of the service say, "Talklets makes the web talk."
"Talklets from Textic lets you listen to any web text in clear, life-like speech with a choice of accents and languages. Website owners can easily add Talklets accessibility to a website to provide vocalised web text for all visitors without the need for downloads or special software.
Talklets is delivered as a service, so integration is easy and no installation is needed for website owners or end users."
It's a text to speech service that web owners can subscribe to. Once subscribed, the site owner need do no more. Anything that shows up as text on a web page can be read to visitors. This includes alt-text associated with imagery, text links, and so forth.
The service offers a variety of voices, languages, even accents, so that a website can deliver a little personality with that menu, thank you.
A subscribed website will get a little "reader" window that can be turned on or off at user preference. This window controls what is read, repeats, even saving selected text to an mp3.
Adding Textic Talklets to websites is very easy. Talklets is 'Software as a Service' (SaaS), so no integration with website code or hardware is required beyond the addition of some brief lines of script to each page to be speech enabled.
Pricing information isn't readily available on the site - it will depend upon the specifics of any given site (traffic, number of pages, and so on). But free trials are available, as well as discounts to not-for-profits
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