Speegle Search Engine Talks to You
Published: Jun 20, 2007Get your search results spoken to you with Speegle. Scottish speech technology firm CEC Systems launched the site last November but not everyone is convinced this is the solution for the blind and visually impaired.
With three different voices Speegle is a unique search engine that can be used without a broadband connection. It has a news option that reads different feeds to the user. But blind people have specialized screen readers like SuperNova, Zoomtext or Magic that do all this for them.
Julie Howell, digital policy manager at the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), expressed doubts in an article on BBC News over whether Speegle and similar sites added anything to blind people’s experience of the Web. “There are a whole lot of options like this springing up on the Web and one has to think carefully about what the market is going to be,” she said. “Blind people have specialized screen readers available to them which will do the job these technologies do in a more sophisticated way,” she added.
“Speegle is proving popular with those learning English in countries such as Japan and China.” The article on BBC News states, and can be very useful for the dyslexic as well. The true value of the Speegle search engine has to be seen in the long run.
Source: BBC News
