Applications in accessibility of text-to-speech synthesis for South African languages: initial system integration and user engagement

Persons with certain disabilities face barriers to information access and interpersonal communication. Assistive technologies provide workaround solutions to these problems. Augmentative and alternative communication systems aid the person with little or no functional speech to speak out loud. Screen readers and accessible e-books allow a print-disabled (visually-impaired, partially-sighted or dyslexic) individual to read text material by listening to audio versions. Text-to-speech synthesis converts electronic text into artificial speech and is used as the vocalisation component in the assistive technologies. For these three use cases, we report on an initial round of system integration and user engagement of the Qfrency text-to-speech voices that provide access to synthetic speech in the South African languages.