Did you know that more than half of Americans with visual impairments are under the age of 65, totaling almost 7.3 million people?
Even if just 10% of them use the internet, there are still hundreds of thousands who rely on assistive technology to travel through digital places.
A common misperception is that blind people have no eyesight at all. In actuality, only 10% are fully blind, with the other 90% having some amount of light sensitivity. Many people with visual impairments read using color correction or magnification, while others prefer braille keyboards to access the internet.
However, for many, text-to-speech (TTS) technology provides an even more effective solution. Apps like Dolphin and Panopreter Basic, as well as CMS tools like Atlasaidev plugin for WordPress users, can read digital text aloud. That makes them extremely useful for those with visual impairments, dyslexia, ADHD, and other learning disorders.
This article will cover everything you need to know about text-to-speech assistive technology. Learn how this powerful tool allows people to interact and access information, making digital content accessible to everyone.
Text-To-Speech Assistive Technology
It is a revolutionary tool that helps people of unique abilities communicate and access information. By converting written text into spoken words with remarkable accuracy and clarity, this technology empowers individuals with visual disabilities, learning inability, or other challenges to engage with written content independently.Â
What Are Assistive Technologies?
As you already know about assistive technologies definition above. So, to explore assistive technologies you need to understand why assistive technologies require and how they cover software, tools, technology, and other items.
Indeed, they are designed to facilitate the completion of activities that might be unfeasible or challenging to do for an impaired person. By offering unique solutions, these technologies attempt to improve the independence, quality of life, and well-being of those with disabilities.
Applications of TTS Technology provide people with disabilities with better adaptive software, communication aids, mobility aids, and hearing aids. Assistive technology can help one overcome a difficulty, improve one’s communication, and reduce the barrier to getting easy access. Participate more fully in social interaction, employment, education, and other aspects of life.
In the end, assistive technologies play a crucial role in empowering self-determination, equal opportunities, and the empowerment of persons with disabilities.
How Does Text-To-Speech Assistive Technology Work?
So far, almost all digital devices, such as PC or Laptop, mobile phones, and tablets, are compatible with TTS. You can read aloud any type of text file, including Word and Pages documents. You may read internet webpages aloud as well.
TTS reads aloud by a computer, and it allows the reader to choose the speed at which they read. While voices vary in quality, some people have their personal choice, like a male tone or female is perfect for listening to them.
Even, sometimes it may seem the sounds produced by synthesizing speech may mimic the words of young children.
A lot of TTS programs highlight words as they are pronounced. Children may now at the same see and hear text for this technology. It is a feature of certain TTS software which is called optical character recognition (OCR).
TTS programs can now read text aloud from photos thanks to the feature. A child may, for instance, snap a picture of a street sign and have the text transcribed into a voice.
Applications of TTS Technology (Best 3 new Text to speech assistive technology tools)
Here are the Popular TTS Software and tools that you can try today.
Best text-to-speech WordPress plugin (Atlasaidev):
Atlasaidev uses state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech technology and SEO-friendly embedding audio players to turn your articles, blog posts, courses, and more into spoken word audio. This plugin is the easiest text-to-speech plugin available, giving your WordPress content a natural voice.
It provides a smooth way to use advanced text-to-speech algorithms and customized players to automatically produce realistic audio versions of your WordPress pages and posts.
Installing it on your website is simple, and you can download the audio as well. Use AtlasVoice Text-to-Speech Pro to find Your Ideal Voice. Select a voice that sounds natural from a range of options to fit your audience and brand.
Provide them with a more interesting and engaging content experience that motivates them on a deeper level.
Key Features:
Advanced Voice Controls:
You can adjust your Text to Audio Plugin with Ease! The Integrated voice controls help you fine-tune your content for maximum clarity. Ensure that the emphasis, volume, and speech tempo exactly reflect your intentions, and you can adjust them. So, It expresses a message clearly and successfully.
Customizable Content Selection:
Change your voice tone instantly! Use the Atlas voice WordPress Text to text-to-speech plugin to grab the right brand voice. Use CSS selectors for complete control to ensure only your excellent and unique voice experience speaks the proper elements.
Increased Content Consumption:
If you are in a short attention span, that is not a problem! With AtlasVoice Text-to-Speech Plugin, you can keep visitors’ attention more than ever. Turn your text into dynamic talk and make it easier for visitors to consume your content easily!
Moreover, It allows to download as many text-to-speech files as needed to transform the text of those speeches with the help of unlimited audio downloads from AtlasVoice. This ensures you can get your voice-to-text information wherever and whenever.
Responsive Voice Text To Speech: This is a good plugin that helps a lot to add speech to your content. The Responsive Voice Text to Speech WordPress plugin makes it accessible and engaging for users on any device. This is done by giving you access to an HTML5-based Text-to-Speech library.
Important features:
- Press the icon to listen instantly to any page or post.
- Using shortcodes, add listen-to buttons to any area of your articles or pages.
- All accessible voices can be accessed with a free API key.
- Use shortcodes to change the Listen button’s look, including the voice parameters, button text, pitch, loudness, and pace.
- With the commercial licenses option, you can remove the ResponsiveVoice branding.
BeyondWords:
BeyondWords is a minimal friction way to produce realistic audio versions of your WordPress static pages and blog posts. It is enhanced with player customization and state-of-the-art text-to-speech technology.
You need to register at BeyondWords to use the plugin. Don’t worry, you can start right away for free. Then, just get the WordPress plugin and set it up after you copy the project ID and API key from your project’s dashboard.
BeyondWords subscribers can access other incredible neural voices from top-tier providers, such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.
You can also test top-notch quality neural voices that are available nowhere else but on BeyondWords, including with voice actors. You can even get a unique voice for your enterprise created.
Most outstanding features:
Easy Conversion: Select the posts and pages that you would like to read out loud, and BeyondWords will take it from there. That automatically generates audible versions that you can encapsulate with a customizable audio player.
Use Artificial Intelligence and Natural Voices: The solution uses AI voices combined with advanced, very configurable natural language processing (NLP) algorithms. Such algorithms give the best pronunciation possible while weeding out the undesirable ones such as names, numbers, and dates.
Text-to-Speech Editor: Using a very user-friendly Text-to-Speech Editor, one can easily create or edit audio. One can adjust and adapt the spoken word experience and shift the sounds to their satisfaction.
Advantages of Text-To-Speech Technology
There are many benefits of TTS Technology using. Here are some of the major advantages:
Accessibility: TTS technology has considerably improved access for visually impaired people, for an individual with dyslexia or any other print disability, by converting text into spoken language and allowing them to interact with digital content less stressfully.
Support for Language Learning: TTS supports those learning a new language in pronunciation, listening comprehension, and fluency as learners receive audio feedback on such elements as vocabulary and phrases from sentences.
Increased productivity: TTS tools generally enhance productivity since most texts, emails, reports, and documents can now more conveniently be listened to while multitasking or on the move.
Cost and time savings: TTS technology massively cuts the time and resources spent in making audio materials such as audiobooks, podcasts, voice-overs, and narration. Hence, it is straightforward for the material to be developed and shared.
Scalability and Consistency: The technology is designed to ensure that information is always delivered constantly and uniformly, irrespective of the varying volume of content or user interactions found in various applications such as navigation systems, announcements, and voice interfaces.
Thus, TTS technology can find an innovative application in virtual assistants, smart devices, educational tools, and entertainment experiences, which will increase interactivity, engagement, and convenience for users.
In most cases, TTS technology itself holds a precious possibility of not just making accessibility better but also generally improving user experience and productivity and bringing new applications into various sectors to make them more inclusive, efficient, and appealing for users in digital settings.
Key Features of Modern TTS Systems
Text-to-Speech (TTS) most fully developed applications rely on current technology and can produce natural-sounding synthetic speech of exemplary quality.
Using the latest text-to-speech, it is implausibly essential to implement the following key features on the system:
Natural-sounding Voices Technology:
Preceding all modern text-to-speech systems, featuring speech sounds as humanly as possible, is of utmost importance by employing a correctly trained voice synthesis model that has all the data to mimic accents.
Customizable Pronunciation: Allows words, acronyms, and any particular strings to be customized according to users’ needs for the correct and consistent speech output.
Multilingual Support: Considering the multilingual demand worldwide, the current TTS features dialectal, accented, or multilingual support.
Related: How to Set Up Multilingual Text to Speech on a WordPress Website (Step By Step)
Prosody Control: Users can manipulate the speech features about speed, pitch, loudness, and pauses to a greater extent to be very creative and natural in the synthesized speech.
It would not be an exaggeration to mention that these essential features of modern TTS are all over the world to make it more natural, flexible, and adaptable in text-to-audio conversion.
Conclusion
Therefore, we can say that text-to-speech assistive technology deeply influences the world. This is a technology that has been of help to a person in the completion of accessible content for processing, acquisition, and use by people with disabilities on an average day. It motivates everyone by allowing them to meet their access needs in various ways.
As we welcome technology into our lives daily and seize even more significant opportunities for equality and freedom it offers, let us work to make it accessible to others.
Through the speech technology of TTS, or synthesis speech, and the power of speech synthesis, a world that is more diverse and powerful allows uncommon abilities to be sustained as much as possible.
