Readspeaker's voice-on-the-web services spread on the web.

Readspeaker, a leader in voice-on-the-web services in Europe, is equipping more and more websites with Acapela's text-to-speech technology.
The latest websites that are now speaking out are the district of Grand Chalon, and Terre-net, the first French agricultural news website, with over 2 million pages viewed per month. The district of Grand Chalon (http://www.legrandchalon.fr), in the heart of the Bourgogne region, counts 108,000 inhabitants over 38 villages and towns. The district decided to speech-enable its website to make it more easily accessible to all as part of a global project. This precious service is based on a simple figure : 10% of the French population, roughly 6 million people, have sight-related problems. Beyond the concern of the visually impaired, Readspeaker also allows users to overcome obstacles such as illiteracy or language problems, and can also just make the interface more comfortable for the average user. Terre-Net (http://www.terre-net.fr) had the same concerns when they decided to ease the access to the agricultural news on its site. Terre-Net is the first French portal to offer speech-enabled access to its content. Today, Terre-Net allows its visitors to listen, at the click of a button, to contents that can be updated up to 20 times a day. This is made possible by the speech synthesis which can read any written information in real time. "By vocalising the news articles on our site, we intend to show our engagement towards an information system that is accessible to the visually impaired." says Arnaud Romoli, CTO of Pole Terre-net Médias. Readspeaker technology is a service available on the internet, even with a low-speed connection. It requires no installation, neither on the users computer, nor on the the site's server. The information is read aloud in real time with a very intelligible voice and incredibly natural voice, provided by Acapela's speech synthesis. Grand Chalon district and Terre-Net join GlaxoSmithKlein laboratories, Sesam Vitale, Yanous! and the French National Assembly (on test untill end of 2004) who have already adopted Readspeaker's solution.