Seniors are

particularly vulnerable to certain age-related vision problems and often

have other reading difficulties that make it difficult to access information

online. According to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey, 92 million

Americans have difficulty reading. Another 8.7 million people have low

vision problems and many of these are seniors.

According to

SeniorMag President Steve Hardman, "While this number is startling,

we expect to see that the number will only grow as baby-boomers age. This

technology is going to have to be deployed and further enhanced to continue

to make the Internet into a viable place for many seniors."

Seniors have

additional problems reading content online. As eyes age, theyare less

able to focus. Bright colors, lack of the developer's attention tocontrast,

and the light that is emitted from the screen make it hard toconcentrate

for a long period of time. Senior eyes quickly become tired.SeniorMag

addressed most of these problems from the start through itsadoption of

color schemes, contrast patterns, and general layout. Yet the staff at

SeniorMag knew that addressing such needs was only the beginning. Millions

more Americans could be enabled through an adoption of a viable text-to-speech

function.

Though text-to-speech

technology isn't exactly brand new, it is new to the Internet. In the

past, such technology was relatively awkward. It required the user to

purchase and load programs on his/her own computer and then copy the text

into another application in order to hear it. Such programs required a

great deal of disc space, could be expensive, and downloading the program

over dial-up modems could take days. Even if someone went through all

the work, there were still problems when uncommon words were encountered.

The result in such cases was gibberish.

SeniorMag chose

SpeakThis technology from Fonix which bypasses all previous problems found

in other deployments. On SeniorMag.com, the user navigates to the page

where the title is large and bold. Pressing the SpeakThis button starts

an immediate translation of the text found on that page into an MP3 file

and it automatically finds the user's MP3 player. Almost every home computer

has such a player built right in. Depending upon the length of the text

and the modem speed, the MP3 player will start reading the text within

seconds.

"Because

we have control over the text-to-speech translation," emphasized

Hardman, "we know which words will be used and can train SpeakThis

to correctly pronounce the words."

The user can

continue to let it play or review any portion of the recording just as

you would with a tape player. Other options include the ability to download

the file and save it to disc, or even email it to a friend. The most amazing

part of it is there are no downloads, and any user can begin using it

immediately without incurring any costs.

"Online

text-to-speech is in its infancy right now and has a long way to go,"

said Hardman. "But we believe that this technology is one of the

most useful ones because while it's definitely on the leading edge, it

addresses the real needs of real people."

More information

can be found at www.SeniorMag.com.

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