Use Streaming Audio To Make Your Blog More Interesting and Accessible To Vision Impaired People

Recently I started to add streaming audio of my blog posts being read aloud on my main blog - idictate.com.au. The original intention was for vision impaired people however the side-effect was that lazy/time poor people could also benefit from having blog posts read aloud to them.

The idea originated after Olympus started to design digital voice recorders with the vision impaired people in mind. This started with using tactile keys and progressed to having a feature called "voice guidance" built into most of the digital voice recorders. Voice guidance prompt the user at every press of a button so that they are aware of what they are selecting, particularly useful to the vision impaired as the screens on digital voice recorders can be quite small and difficult to read. Olympus have gone one step further with the DM-5 digital voice recorder which also supports Daisy Consortium books and can read aloud text from a file.

To facilitate the streaming audio in my WordPress blog I use a service called Sound Cloud.

Please click here to hit to my main blog where you can see streaming audio of my posts in action.

This blog post was written using Dragon Dictate 3 from Nuance, voice recognition software for the Mac.