Somer Housing Group website speaks out
3rd November 2009
Visitors to Somer Housing Group’s website can now
have the pages read aloud, using free software called
BrowseAloud.
The website joins hundreds of other public sector and commercial
sites that are BrowseAloud ready, making it more accessible to
people with mild visual impairments, dyslexia, low literacy and
reading skills, or where English is their second language.
Developed by Texthelp Systems, BrowseAloud is a unique
text-to-speech solution that reads web content aloud, highlighting
each word as it is spoken. This combination greatly improves
comprehension and literacy. The program is completely free for
users to download.
Somer Housing Group – whose members are Bristol-based Redland
Housing Association, and Somer Community Housing Trust and Shape
Housing Association based in Bath – decided to invest in the
software for its website, after holding workshops with residents.
The residents who trialled it were very positive about the
benefits.
Rosemary Taylor from Bath said:
‘I was extremely impressed with it. The
speech was excellent, unlike the built-in speech on my PC which has
only one accent and which reads word by word. With BrowseAloud, the
script flowed. You can set the reading speed to suit you and the
different accents available will be useful to both English people
and those for whom English is not their first language.’
Jane Keeley from Midsomer Norton said:
‘We now have BrowseAloud installed on our
community computer. It is a useful tool for people who are visually
impaired, not only because it reads the text out loud, but because
you can choose to display the text in a large format. It helps your
comprehension if you have dyslexia or find the English language
hard to understand. It’s also easy to set up the options the way
you want them.’
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