Trial readspeaker on TWFY

[JenMysoc]

Linked to #1169 we'd like to trial an installation of ReadSpeaker on TheyWorkForYou

From their email some things we should note:

Please note the following premises for the sandbox account:

1. ... there’s a time limited access to the account.
2. ... no customizations are included in this account.
3. ... implementations with this account is intended for internal testing only.

In our customer portal you will find implementation instructions for the recommended product(s) and different voices to choose from. The recommended product for you is Enterprise Highlighting 2.5 . The recommended voice for you is Alice(en_uk).

Log in on https://app.readspeaker.com/portal

@jenmysoc and @MyfanwyNixon have the log in details

If possible we should try and trial this across the whole site to see how well it copes with things like the homepage. If this looks like too much work then let's scale it back and cherry pick some pages so we can get a good idea of the functionality.

If there is a way to do this without it being publicly available while we trial that would be good!

[MyfanwyNixon]

Testing on debate and WRANS pages at http://struan.theyworkforyou.dev.mysociety.org

Please add any comments to this ticket.

[MyfanwyNixon]

Here's a very minor point: sentences including phrases like " hon. and hon. Friends." confuse Readspeaker as it believes that a full stop followed by a capital letter signifies a new sentence.

Not sure why but it also reads 'hon' as 'han' and, more understandably, HM as 'um'. I wonder if you can teach it exceptions.

[zarino]

Setting aside the question of whether it’s right for us to be implementing custom text-to-speech functionality into our pages, rather than just making sure our sites work well with whatever text-to-speech systems visitors might already have baked into their devices or browsers…

I did feel it was a shame that clicking the "Listen" button next to the Question on http://struan.theyworkforyou.dev.mysociety.org/wrans/?id=2009-10-29a.296343.h didn't also read the Answer out. This is especially tedious on Debate pages, where I have to click each "Listen" button in sequence down the page.

Also, flying pig time – if we did get to the point where the entire debate is read out (rather that one contribution at a time) it would be awesome if we could use data from Gender Balance to switch the voice between male and female, to match the speaker.

[MyfanwyNixon]

@zarino I'm reminded of Parliament's implementation of 'share this' where you can choose to either share a whole debate or just one section. It'd be good to be able to do the same with audio.

[struan]

http://struan.theyworkforyou.dev.mysociety.org/mp/10383/john_martin_mcdonnell/hayes_and_harlington <-- MP vote profiles which seems like the next most useful candidate

[MyfanwyNixon]

We probably can't do anything about this but in sentences ending in 'generally voted for' the intonation is wrong. The emphasis should be on 'for'.

Also - and I guess this is one for the designers - I couldn't find the button at first because having seen the debates pages, I was expecting it to be at the top. You'd want some uniformity in the positioning.

[struan]

Also on help page now.

I think possibly the next step is to have a think about whether we think this gains us anything.

It looks like the voice switching thing is built in - http://demo.readspeaker.com/?p=hl.autovoiceswitch_exp&l=en-us or possibly it's an extra but it's possible certainly. You just need to add a style="voice-family: female" tag it looks like.

[tmtmtmtm]

We probably can't do anything about this but in sentences ending in 'generally voted for' the intonation is wrong. The emphasis should be on 'for'.

Interestingly, I'm not convinced that that would be the obvious reading to most humans either on a first pass.

[MyfanwyNixon]

@tmtmtmtm Maybe I just have strange intonation :) but when it's a sentence like

John Martin McDonnell consistently voted against allowing ministers to intervene in inquests, while most Labour MPs almost always voted for.

where you're contrasting the 'for' with the 'against' that precedes it, I reckon it needs more stress than the speaker is giving it. She sounds like she's expecting a word to come after it.

[MyfanwyNixon]

@tmtmtmtm Oh wait, do you mean that most readers will misunderstand the sentence because of the way it's constructed?

[MyfanwyNixon]

Some useful thoughts from Doug:

I asked him: "Is Readspeaker really of benefit to those users who it's perceived to help? Won't those people already have already set their browser settings to act as screen readers?".

Here's his reply.

That's a good question and the core one I think. The answer is: most definitely yes and mostly no, respectively.

The issue is: disabled people are much less likely to be technically proficient. The OFCOM UK Adults Media Literacy Report 2011 states that just under half of disabled people in the UK have never accessed the Internet. The Kings Fund: Future trends report on disease and disability states that disabled people are 3½ times more likely to struggle with written English than non-disabled people. Just under one third of disabled people have no formal qualifications; this is three times the proportion in the general population.

I know a lot of disabled people who have very limited (if any) literacy, and who struggle with technology. Would they have screenreaders on their PC and are they technically proficient enough to use one? The answer to both is No. So mostly they get by with Skype, Facebook photos and videos, and perhaps, at a stretch, Youtube. But TWFY or WDTK would be totally and utterly inaccessible to them.

A simple button one can press that reads stuff out in a comprehensible fashion without having to install specialist software etc. would make things a lot more accessible to them. It requires the minimum of technical ability on their part, and the minimum of prep. This also means they can use e.g. the communal computer in the care home, or in the library, if they haven't got internet access at home - which research shows is much more common amongst disabled people than non-disabled. One can't install and customise specialist accessibility software on communal PCs.

In any case, it fits with disabled campaigners' politics which is all based on the Social Model. We aren't disabled by our medical problems, we are disabled by society's disabling structures and everybody's failure to make the effort to adjust so that disabled people can access as much as anybody else.

If I'm prevented from getting up a kerb, it's not because I've got X condition and use a wheelchair, it's because whomever designed and built that pavement didn't comply with their moral duty to ensure they make it accessible.

There are wheelchairs which balance on rear wheels, go up kerbs and all the rest of it. But they're expensive so not everybody can afford them (anything specialist for disabled people is 10x the cost), and unsuitable in other ways, and inconvenient, and it would just be easier if the people putting in kerbs thought about people with mobility issues and put in a drop kerb.

It is good to make adjustments to make it as easy as possible for disabled people rather than expecting disabled people, who are disadvantaged in so many ways, to make the adjustments themselves.

On screen readers:

The landscape in screenreaders has changed a bit. It used to be that there were only two screenreader softwares available, and one in practice: Jaws and IBM Homepage Reader, then just Jaws. They were really really rubbish in their output, and very difficult to learn - only the most tech savvy could master them. They were also horrifically expensive. I see that Jaws still is $895.00 for a single user home edition: http://sales.freedomscientific.com/Category/11_1/JAWS%c2%ae_Screen_Reader.aspx Disabled people are much more likely to be in poverty than non-disabled, so less able to afford that.

As a result, down the line, the open source community has developed free, better-performing versions. Perhaps the most common one is NVDA http://www.nvaccess.org/ They're better, but not the universal panacea. (If this was an area MySoc wanted to do something in that would be rather wonderful!)

[dracos]

I do think that screenreaders is not really the point here; the browser I'm currently using (Safari) has built in text-to-speech (select text, right click, "Start speaking"), Chrome has a Speak extension, Firefox has free extensions such as FoxVox, Text to Voice or Speechify. Should we be pushing/campaigning for libraries + care homes and everything Doug mentions to make sure this sort of software is installed so that people can use the on any website, not just the ones who can afford a fee for some sever-side software? It's not about specialist accessibility software. This is precisely the social model; the computers should be adjusted for all, not every single website that could potentially be looked at on those computers.

Of course, this doesn't mean this isn't useful here and now. I agree that I would expect a play button by a speech to start there and continue down the whole page until I stop it, not just the current speech alone. More problematically, that Q/A example is pretty poor for reading in general - the answer repeats the question; there's a question number immediately after the question quoted in the answer that conceivably sounds like the answer to the question, but it's not, there's then paragraphs of verbiage before you'd even get to the table. This may be a bad example, debates are probably better suited to be listened to, after all :)

[kingqueen3065]

they SHOULD be adjusted for all, but there is 0 chance of this happening uniformly across public institutions or individuals' computers any time soon, and in the meantime having a read aloud functionality on TWFY or other MySoc sites may make a major difference, as you say. I know that MySoc has a useful tactic of acting as if systems were better than they actually are, e.g. TWFY acting as if Hansard wasn't copyrighted when in fact it is, and WhatDoTheyKnow adding bodies that aren't subject to FOI. This can be useful but I would argue an assumption that PCs have been set up for disabled people to use and disabled people know how to use those access features is sadly not accurate or helpful. For an example of good use of Readspeak, see http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/foi-reveals-ehrc-chairs-conflict-of-interest-over-welfare-reform-inquiry/ (on an FOI-related article)