If you visit this site: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ you will find information on Festival, an open source product that converts text to audio. My friend Peter Rukavina is using it to audiofy his weblog at http://www.reinvented.net/article/1559 so if you visit his site you can see how it works.
Basically it gives you the option of clicking a link and hearing text. I haven't used it myself, other than at Peter's blog, but it strikes me as a great tool for producing proceedings that need to be both visual and audio. If you were doing an OST meeting with blind folks who needed to hear the proceedings, you could record the proceedings on a website (with a wiki for example) and have the text converted to audio as well. If you put a link on each proceedings page with, say, an ear graphic, non-readers would know to click that and get the audio. I'm sure it would be fairly straight forward to make this accessible for blind people too, who already have tools for websurfing. Anyway, it's just another accessibility tool that struck me as really useful for our work, more so because it's open source and free to download and install. It seems like some technical savvy is needed, but that also seems like a good skill to learn. Chris --- CHRIS CORRIGAN Bowen Island, BC, Canada http://www.chriscorrigan.com ch...@chriscorrigan.com (604) 947-9236 * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu, Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
