Web Experiment: I Added Speech Synthesis to My Blog
I was reading hackaday yesterday, and encountered an odd little project: a synthesized "Numbers" station which used an API built in to most modern browsers to simulate a Numbers station, which are short wave broadcasts of seemingly random numbers which are thought to be transmissions to send messages to intelligence operatives in foreign countries.
I thought it was cool, and had a look at the code that generated the page. It seemed impossibly simple. I had never looked into the Web Speech APIs before, but immediately found that they were pretty straightforward. I wondered if I could use similar code to insert the ability to read aloud postings on this blog.
Twenty minutes later, I had this basic implementation. What's pretty cool is that it just required some additions to the template for posts: there were no logic changes in the static site generation code. There is now a button above each entry (somewhat inartistically placed) which you can click to have it read the article to you.
I doubt that it's really sufficient for people who are actually visually impaired, but to be fair I haven't seriously thought about accessibility in this blog. If anyone has any references about best practices for creating accessible websites, I'd love to hear them and see if there is some small to medium changes that I could make to improve this website. Feel free to send me an email if you have any hints.
Have a good day.