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Re: Web based screen readers

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Jun 18, 2013 9:38AM

On 18/06/2013 16:20, Angela French wrote:
>
>> Can someone tell ignorant me how this is typically implemented? Do they have
>> one or more recordings of the part and/or its sections pre-done? Or are they
>> suing some sort of server-side text-to-speech technology?
>>
>>
> Are you referring to products like BrowseAloud? http://www.browsealoud.com/page.asp?pg_id=80094
> I think there are others on the market like this too.

And as we're talking BrowseAloud, in answer to the original question of
how they do it: unless they've changed their ways, BA is a plugin that
needs to be installed on the user's machine. This installs a
text-to-speech functionality that runs directly on the client, but it
also regularly "phones home" to grab a whitelist of URLs. These are the
URLs of people who've paid for the BA service. If the site you're
currently on is not in this whitelist (which happens to be a simple text
file), the BA plugin will remain silent.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke