Skills for Access

Description

A speech browser is a software application specifically to enable browsing web content in audio. Speech browsers combine text-to-speech technology with dedicated web browsing functionality, and hence can be particularly capable at processing and outputting HTML and other web content.

Since their functionaility is limited to web browsing, speech browsers are generally much cheaper than full-blown screen readers; they are also be particularly useful as web site evaluation tools for developers and producers, offering the ability to visually chart the progress of the browser through a page as it reads out the page content.

Multimedia Incompatibility

As with any non-graphic display device, for effective and understandable audio output, speech browsers must rely on the provision of an appropriate text alternative for any graphical feature. They may also be unforgiving of HTML, spelling or typographical errors, and may have difficulty coping with dynamically refreshing page content; animated content such as Flash is also likely to present a significant problem.