Hi all! I just did a beta release of some software I've been working on for a few months now. Accessibility is one of its primary goals, so I wanted to ask if people would be willing to use it and give feedback if they can. Any notes at all would be much appreciated. Important note: this is a demo site, and, due to how expensive Google Cloud text-to-speech is, I cannot afford to keep it running indefinitely. I am working on solving this problem, but for now, I plan on shutting down the beta in about a week.
The web app link is here. The following is a description of the app.
ReadtoMyShoe (RTMS) is a web app that lets you upload articles (via URL or via directly pasting) and listen to them (via text-to-speech) at a later time. Some features:
Offline-first: All the articles in your queue are available offline. RTMS is usable even in airplane mode.
High-quality text-to-speech: RTMS uses the Google Cloud Text to Speech WaveNet voices. It's not quite human yet, but it's pretty nice.
Saves your progress: Don't lose your place in your reading material. RTMS will save where you are. So next time you play an article, it'll resume right where you left off.
Lockscreen controls: Play, pause, jump 10 seconds. It's all available from the lock screen or notification bar of your mobile device.
Runs anywhere: Since RTMS is a web app, it runs everywhere a (modern) web browser runs.
Add to Homescreen: RTMS can be added to your homescreen and behave just like a native app.
"Doesn't this exist?" Eh, sorta. I was using Pocket to listen to articles before this, and it was terrible. The UI had (and continues to have) show-stopping bugs, and there are practically never updates for it anymore. There are other apps too, but most of them are native apps, and the only decent ones I could find were also pretty exploitative (lots of pop-ups everywhere, free trials with no pricing info, etc.). You can also use the screen reader directly, but 1) if you put it in your pocket with the screen on, and something touches the screen, it disrupts playback entirely, 2) the screen reader doesn't distinguish UI elements from article text, and 3) the screen reader doesn't save your position if you pause reading and come back later.
Source code: Everything here is open source. Please leave comments, open PRs, open Issues, etc. at the Github.
Comments
Don't We Have This?
I use and quite enjoy Voice Dream Reader for both eBooks and audio books.
Hi Chris. Thanks for the…
Hi Chris. Thanks for the pointer! I played around with Voice Dream Reader a bit and indeed it seems to cover just about every use case for RTMS. Dream has not as good voice quality but imo it makes up for it with the extreme flexibility that comes with on-system TTS. And while Dream doesn't do text extraction itself, it can connect to Pocket, letting Pocket do the extraction parts for it. The only thing I guess I can say is that RTMS is cross platform, and that's about it.
Thanks again!
Your app does not work
Hello,
I tried downloading an article, and it said arror parsing audio data. I can’t even go to the cue to attempt to download another article. I’m 100% sure it will not work. I am running VoiceOver with iOS 15.0.
Re: Your app does not work
Hi Daniel. So sorry the site is broken for you. Do you get this error when trying to play the article or download it from the library and into the queue? Where does it say the error, and what happens when you refresh? If it's really stuck (I've never encountered this), you can reset the entire website's data by going to Settings -> Safari -> Advanced -> Website Data, and removing readtomyshoe.com
Plans ahead?
So what is going to happen after the Beta week is over? With apps like Voice Dream, if one wants to listen to the text content using premium voices, they have to be purchased individually. So I believe the significance of this web app depends on the purchase/subscription plan that is going to be offered.
I could successfully add and read a few articles. The layout also appears very accessible. I was also wondering whether there may be more than one voices to choose from.
Thanks.
How much will you charge?
It is well known that those voices will cost you around 10$/month/user for something like half an hour of reading a day.
Unless you are a philanthropist and want to pay this amount to everyone so they can get it for free it would be nice to disclose on how much you will charge when the service runs out of beta.
Re charging
tripolice and Labsii: Good questions. I truly don't know what the appropriate path forward is. $10 per user per month is about correct, maybe even on the low end. My thought is to maybe allow users to link their Google Cloud accounts so that they can be billed directly, and thus get billed only for what they use. Alternatively I could set up a payment system on my own website. Neither of these is a great solution, and it's really unfortunate how much of a barrier the cost is. Do y'all have any ideas? Is the voice quality worth it?
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I get the error not parsing audio when downloading an article
Error parsing audio
Hi Daniel. Could you give a description and maybe a screenshot of the error? Where exactly do you see the error, and does it happen for every article?