code required: text to speech for a webpage

[jstewie]

Hello, I need some help either finding some code or something to help me get text to speech/voice for a webpage? Can anyone help me?

[mattyod]

If such a thing is even possible with just Javascript it would probably be something of a life long project for the greatest of Javascript gurus. So I don't think you are going to get a snippet of code from someone.

What you are probably looking for is some type of "screen reader" or a speaking browser like IBMs Home Page Reader (http://www-3.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr.html) They aren't cheap though.

Why do you want such a thing out of interest?

[brothercake]

There's a few options for speech on the web, none of which are ideal, but all offer possibilities.

The Microsoft Speech API works really well, but only in Windows IE for people who have or download the components, and only in a trusted environment. It's not really ideal, but it's the easiest to pick up and start using, and the chances are your end users can work with it, even if they do have modify security settings to do so. The best place to start with that is to download the speech SDK - it has web samples that will get you going http://www.microsoft.com/speech/download/sdk51/

Opera 8 has voice capabilities, which are programmable through XHTML+Voice. Obviously anything you do here is only gonna work in that browser for now, but at least it's all based on standards, so in the future it could be more widely useful. If you want to get into web speech applications in a serious way long term, this would be the technology to investigate. Resources can be found at http://my.opera.com/community/dev/voice/

Finally, there is a guy who's written a DLL that provides communication between Gecko and the Microsoft Speech API, which allows for speech applications to be written in Firefox and other mozilla browsers. I don't have any links for that, but google for "firefox" and "speech" or some such combination, and you'll probably turn something up