Listen to Wikipedia entries

Wikipedia is one of the best resources on the internet but it still doesn’t fully cater for hard of seeing or blind internet users.

Speakapedia is a simple tool for Mac OS X which creates podcasts from Wikipedia articles. It’s great for those with hearing difficulties or those that have trouble reading on their Mac. You can use the Speakapedia interface to browse and choose articles and then download them directly to your iPod or iPhone. Speakapedia features a dedicated browser to navigate Wikipedia and once you click on “Speak It!” it shows you the different parts of the article that can be translated into audio format. All non essential text is filtered out, leaving just the main article text. You can also choose which sections within your article you wish to convert to speech. You can listen to some examples on the developer website and while it works well, the voices obviously sound very robotic and some words are hard to understand.

Speakapedia provides a quick and easy way to translate Wikipedia articles into something that those with poor eye sight can at least understand.