Hello everyone, I'm considering adding audio narration to the website pages. Instead just serving the text to read why not to offer visitor an option to listen instead of reading. Just to make it clear, I'm not trying to replace the text with voice narration, just add it as an alternative to users something I might personally choose instead of just reading. As I'm sure many of you would prefer to watch a short video that summarizes a product featured or about the company VS reading long text about it. After doing google search, unfortunately there is not much pros and cons on that topic. Wanted to ask your opinion maybe someone saw a site with similar functionality or you simply have your own opinion on that. Any feed back is very much appreciated.
Looking that no one comments, I was thinking more on this subject and I got my own conclusion, but feel free to correct me if you feel I'm wrong or you saw a fantastic implementation of it somewhere on the web. I guess audio is just plain unpractical for use, since you will have to pay for audio narration to be done by professional narrator (if you change the text, the narration will be out of the window) and only few if any will really want to listen instead of just reading/scanning the page on their own more convenient and faster. Also since narration recorded in a sequence timeline, some will find it annoying to to wait till it will reach the point of the readers interest subject topic. Well it was just a thought i was curious to hear others feedback on.
You'd want audio almost solely for accessibility - so blind people or people with limited vision can use your site. And they'll be using a product like Jaws, which will read the screen to them. People who are capable of reading your site will usually prefer to read it. Just make sure that the font is a decent size, that you don't use fixed-width (so the text reflows if the user zooms in) and that there's good contrast between the text and the background. Amber text on a yellow background may be nice and warm, but once you pass 40 it becomes something you skip because reading it becomes painful.
Audio is a bandwidth hog -- and anyone who wants it read to them, as Rukbat said, will have what is called a "screen reader" already to read it to them... like Jaws, like Apple's built-in functionality, like Opera's built-in functionality, etc, etc... PROPERLY navigating with a screen reader is more about using semantic markup and having a logical document structure - just like all other forms of accessibility like braille readers and associated navigation methods like accesskeys menus and heading navigation (which is why logical heading orders are important!) - if you care about people wanting it read to them by their browser you should be putting your efforts there, instead of trying to implement some form of narration on your own.