Magna launches talking websites

10/30/2009

Magna Housing Group has further enhanced its commitment to residents by speech-enabling its new websites.

The group has recently revamped all its sites, including Magna Housing Association, Magna West Somerset Housing association and Magna Careline.

The revolutionary service is being provided by BrowseAloud, which offers  a text-to-speech solution that reads all accessible website content aloud in a high quality human sounding voice.

The voice can be altered to suit the individual’s specific needs and as text is read aloud, words are highlighted - a useful tool which aids literacy and comprehension.

Leigh Carr, Magna’s web manager, said: “Making our website more accessible to visitors who may have had problems reading content was a priority for us when planning our new sites.

“This fits into Magna’s commitment to offer services that are fully inclusive and reach out to all our tenants.

“It made sense for us to join BrowseAloud as we are constantly striving to provide the best service possible.”

Magna websites provide a comprehensive range of services to its tenants and clients, some of whom require additional support when accessing online information.

BrowseAloud is the ideal solution to assist those with literacy difficulties, dyslexia, mild visual impairments or where English is spoken as a second language. In the UK it is estimated that approximately 5.2 million adults (16% of the adult population) have difficulties with literacy.

With the addition of BrowseAloud, visitors to all of Magna’s websites will now be able to access online information with greater ease.

Key features include MP3 audio output, a talking dictionary and text magnification.  BrowseAloud will also read accessible HTML, PDF documents, hyperlinks and tags behind images.

The Browsealoud service can be downloaded for free from any of Magna's websites.  Once installed, Browsealoud will also be enabled for all other websites who use the service.