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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Wed, Jan 09 2013 6:47AM
Subject: Server-based web-page readers and accessibility (need a resource on this)
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Yea wise ones.

I have a somewhat unique, and slightly irritating, problem.
In Iceland, there has been an aggressive campaign to sell a
server-based web reading solution to newspapers, government, and other
major websites.
There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but I am already beginning
to get emails from people indicating that they think they have solved
their accessibility issues by implementing a server-based webreader on
their sites.
This is, as we all know, of course absolutely untrue, in fact I think
TTS readers on servers serve a very small group of users (people with
dyslexia for instance), and definitely does not serve the VI community
for instance, and deaf people are not known to benefit from
text-to-speech.
Basically, though well-intensioned, I am already beginning to notice
the damage to real web accessibility improvements.

If you know of any actual research or existing article discussing the
pros (and especially the cons) of server-based website TTS reading
out there, it would be fantastic to get links to such a resource.
I will, of course, write one on my own to point this out, but it's
always nice to start with an existing article if possible.
Cheers
-B