The website of Bournemouth’s premier shopping park has become the first in the world to incorporate a new type of easy-to-use talking text facility. This development follows recommendations from the disability forum that meets on a regular basis at Castlepoint to provide advice and suggestions to enhance physical accessibility to the park and to information.
When Castlepoint’s website was upgraded in April, not only was the option to increase text size introduced, but the new Talklets toolbar was integrated for the first time by the Maidenhead based text – to- speech specialist Textic Limited.
Sarah Ryan, Business & Marketing Manager at Castlepoint, received immediate positive reaction, not only from the disability forum, but also visitors to the website.
“The talking text has proved to be very popular. The usage went up by over 13% immediately. Visitors with impaired sight or dyslexia are the most obvious to benefit currently from the feature. We also know that foreign visitors who cannot read English that well can also understand more of the information by listening to the natural sounding text,” said Sarah Ryan.
Castlepoint has now asked David West, a consultant at Textic, to prepare the site for the introduction of translation Talklets, so that any of the English text can be selected and listened to in a variety of languages.
“We are delighted that our Talklets toolbar has enhanced accessibility to the website,” said David West. “Our Talklets text-to-speech service is now becoming more widely used. It is so simple for website designers to incorporate it and to demonstrate compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act. Any selected text is read instantly with no downloading necessary and we can currently translate 23 languages too!”
Photo Captions: Sarah Ryan and David West listen to the selected text.
