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Submissions/Wikipedia will soon speak to you

From Wikimania

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2017.


Submission no. 3011 Subject - TO
Title of the submission

Wikipedia will soon speak to you - Wikispeech is coming to a wiki near you.

Type of submission (lecture, panel, tutorial/workshop, roundtable discussion, lightning talk, poster, birds of a feather discussion)

Lecture

Author of the submission

John.andersson@wikimedia.se & Sebastian.berlin@wikimedia.se

Username

John Andersson (WMSE) & Sebastian Berlin (WMSE)

Country of origin

Sweden

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Wikimedia Sverige

Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (up to 300 words to describe your proposal)

The development of Wikispeech, a new MediaWiki extension, has started. By the end of 2017 Wikipedia should be able to speak to you. The project will bring together existing language resources and develop a functioning open source text-to-speech solution for Swedish, English and Arabic. More languages will be easy to add in the future.

Wikispeech will make Wikipedia accessible for anyone that faces reading difficulties, whether that is due to vision impairment, dyslexia, they never had an opportunity to learn literacy, or any other number of reasons. Hundreds of millions of people fit those profiles.

It will be possible through crowdsourcing to improve Wikispeech. You may, for example, help develop the pronunciation dictionary used by the program to make it sound more correct. In this way, the speech synthesizer is constantly improved and annoying errors can be corrected by the user.

We will present about what we are trying to achieve, what has been done, what is left to do and what you can help with in order to get millions of people accessibility to the information on Wikipedia.

What will attendees take away from this session?

Attendees will learn about a project and about the work around accessibility on the Wikimedia projects.

Theme of presentation

Intermediate

Length of session (if other than 25 minutes, specify how long)

25 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)
Special requests


Interested attendees

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  1. Daniel Mietchen (talk) 16:49, 28 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  2. ערן (talk) 21:25, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Jsamwrites (talk) 10:45, 9 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  4. GastelEtzwane (talk) 12:51, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  5. One of my motivations to join this Wikimania! Psubhashish (talk) 11:10, 15 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  6. LZia (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 22 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Jamie Tubers (talk) 15:32, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Frhdkazan (talk) 19:31, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Wassan.anmol (talk) 02:05, 26 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  10. --Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE) (talk) 08:07, 17 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Camelia (talk) 10:42, 26 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  12. Mlemusrojas (talk) 14:41, 1 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  13. NickK (talk) 13:40, 12 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]