Google Chome Goodies

Today my web wanderings took me to two interesting websites that are Google Chrome friendly and promote accessibility.

The first website I found was soundgecko by 121Cast, a free text-to-audio web service. This handy webapp allows you to have any web article text transcribed to audio format (mp3 and Google Chome extension). Since the audio file is in a friendly format, it can be played on just about any device. 

I decided to test it out myself, so I tagged an article from Yahoo and sent it away...and received it back within 5 minutes. I pressed the "listen" button and heard my article.
Here is a link to the article I selected:   Raisman Article


Not too bad for a free conversion. How can you access this?

The steps are easy! 
1. Find your article
2. Email the article URL to go@soundgecko.com
3. The article is sent to your email in mp3 format

Other ways to enjoy Soundgecko? You can download the Soundgecko iphone app from the iTunes store (it is free!), or get the Google Chrome Extension to tag articles. Soundgecko allows you to send the files to your Dropbox or other cloud storage site.

On to the next app...

TalkTyper is only available through the Google Chrome browser. It is free and easy to use. Basically all you have to do is click on the microphone icon and begin speaking. 

Your translated words will appear in a dialog box for you to see. I had fun testing the limits of the speech recognition software, and found that in order to improve accuracy, I had to speak at a slower rate than usual and enunciate, particularly with the softer letters and blends (p, th etc..). Fortunately, you can edit the text before cutting and pasting into your document. Try it out!