Actually the very concept - to have the text of homepages read aloud – is quite obvious! Still, nobody has taken the effort of developing this concept until now. This may be owing to a lack of prestige in developing tools and aids for those challenged with difficulties in reading ad writing. And this is in spite of a survey carried out in 2000 by the OECD stating that to some extent almost a quarter of all Danes are challenged with reading and writing difficulties, points out Christian Hjulmand, project manager of ”A Speaking Internet Portal”.

The concept of the project was quite straight forward – at least in principle: The object was to develop a portal, which would be able to read aloud any homepage by means of synthetic speech.

The Speech was the Tricky Part
To Escom Data ApS of Hjørring, who has been in charge of the technical part of developing the Portal, the road, however, has been paved with technical difficulties.
- We have had four employees working to make the Portal function properly. One of the practical challenges we encountered was making the speech synthesis work on the Internet. Another problem was that nothing but a standard browser can be expected to be readily deployed at the end users' work stations. Consequently all the software developed for this feature is located on our server down in the basement. And ultimately the response times have caused serious trouble, explains Erik Aaskoven, director of Escom Data.
A new and faster server solved part of the problem. Stil, the time lapse from having selected a text on the portal till the ”reading aloud” begins, is a few seconds.
Crucial to the success of the Portal was also the clearness of the speech synthesis.
- Earlier generations of speech synthesis sounded like some outlandish accent. Today, however it is actually quite understandable, thanks to the developing effort at e.g. the CPK (Center for Personal Communication) of Aalborg University. Still, you need to familiarize yourself to the speech, emphasizes Christian Hjulmand.
Reading aloud via the adgangforalle.dk site is still limited to texts in Danish. But in principle no technical problems would stop the portal from processing English texts as well in the future

Download a ”Remote Control”
One of the great ideas of the project was that the endusers should not need to download any software to have texts read aloud. However, this idea was abandoned, .
- Today it works the way that if you want a text read aloud, the process is enabled via the portal: For example text could be added using Cut and Paste. But over summer we will release a small ”remote control” for download free of charge by everyone. Then you can enter all homepages and have all text read aloud without the need of going to our portal, explains Erik Aaskoven.
The remote control is located in a tiny separate ’window’, that can be moved freely about on the screen. Using the remote control you can stop the reading and for instance read a sentence over again. It is easy to use and operate, and the people behind the Speaking Internet Portal have great expectations.
Currently the project is in search of citizens of North Denmark who might be interested in acting as test persons – both on the Portal and using the upcoming Remote Control. We are looking for people preferably coping with dyslexia. If you are interested in a cooperation, please contact Christian Hjulmand on telephone 98 90 35 88.