Skip to main content

New Text-to-Speech Options Offer Access to a Broader Market

ReadSpeaker Logo
While the opportunities in digital publishing keep growing, so do the challenges. It's no longer enough to get your content online and figure out how to market and sell it. The digital audience is getting broader and more diverse, which means you need to adapt to new ways of consuming content. Helping publishers meet these challenges is Tizra's mission, as demonstrated in recent enhancements like improved mobile supportenhanced online reading, and better ways to deliver digital first-content.

Now we're going a step farther, and adding text-to-speech capabilities through a partnership with ReadSpeaker, the worldwide leader in this area since 1999. Soon, you'll not only be able to reach users across a wide range of devices and platforms through Tizra, but will also be able to reach all levels of reading ability, different learning styles, and users with visual and other disabilities.

This partnership is a great fit not only because ReadSpeaker's commitment to technical excellence and user-centered design matches our own, but because both companies share the belief that the best way to reach the widest audience is through the the web. The web's open standards mean our systems work together easily and smoothly, and offer the best possible compatibility with popular reading devices and platforms.

How it Works
Readers will start the text-to-speech feature by clicking on a Listen button within the Tizra-hosted content, launching the ReadSpeaker keyboard-controlled audio player. ReadSpeaker's natural-sounding text-to-speech is offered in 32 different languages to address all your audiences, and highlights text as it is read to promote better understanding — especially critical for educational and medical publishers.

Text-to-speech features include:
  • Multiple languages and multiple voices per language
  • Customizable reading area, order and speed
  • Text highlighting with customizable colors and segmenting by sentence or word
  • Pronunciation dictionary
  • WCAG 2.0 compliance
By offering text-to-speech capabilities, you'll be able to extend the reach of your online content to audience segments that are otherwise underserved, including those with visual impairments, learning disabilities including dyslexia, as well as reluctant readers and those who simply prefer audio consumption.

Get Text-to-Speech
Text-to-speech is rolling out to current customers over the next two months and will be an available option for all new Tizra customers. Existing Tizra customers can upgrade to incorporate text-to-speech capabilities for their content. Contact Tizra to learn more.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Postcard from Tools of Change

Think back to the summer of 2007. The first iPhones are just hitting the stores. Kindle is still a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye. And in the words of Publishers Weekly, "a festival of practical geekery" is taking place in San Jose, CA. That festival was the first Tools of Change for Publishing conference. We were there , of course. And while comparatively small, it was the largest gathering we'd found of people who cared as much as we did about the transition from print to digital books. That's still true today, which is why I'm excited to be on the floor of ToC 2010 as I write this. The show's a lot bigger now, and has spread beyond its geeky roots to focus on seismic shifts we're all aware of…the explosion of handheld devices , social software and changes in the ways all of us find and use information. If you're here, come see us. We'll be in booth 114 with our partners Digital Divide Data , and you can ...

Kindle's Cool, but Remember the Web?

If anyone can obsolete the printed book, Amazon can, and they're clearly taking a formidable whack at it with their handheld Kindle reader. We can't help wondering, though, how many consumers will really pay $400 for a single-purpose reading device, when alternatives from a riotously competitive hardware market combine reading with phone, messaging, music and other capabilities. For example, the iPhone pictured here, with a tasty looking page delivered via Tizra's Agile PDF . We wish we could say it's the result of some special technology we came up with for delivering books to mobile devices, but really it's just a byproduct of the fact that Agile PDF makes books work like the web. So as the web finds its way into more mobile devices, so will books published with Agile PDF. Meanwhile, of course, there are already a billion or so eager readers accessing the web through more traditional means. By the way, the sesame crusted tuna's from Montreal's Aix Cui...