Wikispeech/Communicate your support/Draft communication
Wikispeech – draft communication
Drafts for chat groups[edit]
Drafts for mailing lists[edit]
These drafts can be used to create and send emails to mailing lists. Feel free to change the drafts according to your context and preferences. "Spread the word" might be a good choice to use when your community has little or no previous knowledge about Wikispeech. "Engage your community" might be a good choice if your community likely has heard about Wikispeech before, and is engaged in diversity and accessibility issues since before. "Establish Wikispeech within your community" might, finally, be the best choice if you believe that your community in the long term would like to integrate Wikispeech into the language of the community.
Spread the word
Heading: About the Wikispeech project
Content:
Hi everyone!
The Wikispeech project will soon be activated as a Beta function in English. The project aims to build a text-to-speech synthesis, that will make it possible to listen to Wikipedia articles. The beta version will be released in English, Swedish and Arabic, but the goal is to open up for more languages, and to engage volunteers in the work to develop it.
I wanted to give a shoutout to the project, which I think will radically increase the possibilities for people with reading difficulties or visual impairment to access Wikipedia. I also think that we should start working in the long term towards having Wikispeech activated in the languages of our community. If you want to follow the development too, you can sign up here. In the meanwhile, I think we should have a discussion on how we could work for Wikispeech in our community.
Best, ~~~~
Engage your community
Heading: Engage in Wikispeech!
Content:
Hi everyone!
The Wikispeech project will soon be activated as a Beta function in English. The project aims to build a text-to-speech synthesis, that will make it possible to listen to Wikipedia articles. The beta version will be released in English, Swedish and Arabic, but the goal is to open up for more languages, and to engage volunteers in the work to develop it.
I wanted to give a shoutout to the project, which I think will radically increase the possibilities for people with reading difficulties or visual impairment to access Wikipedia. I would also love to see people from our community engaged in the project. If you want to engage in Wikispeech too, you can sign up here. We could start reaching out to accessibility groups in our community, and do some outreach around this project. I also think that it would be important within the Wikimedia movement that we express our explicit support, to make the development go quicker!
Best, ~~~~
Establish Wikispeech within your community
Heading: Wikispeech in x language?
Content:
Hi everyone!
The Wikispeech project will soon be activated as a Beta function in English. The project aims to build a text-to-speech synthesis, that will make it possible to listen to Wikipedia articles. The beta version will be released in English, Swedish and Arabic, but the goal is to open up for more languages, and to engage volunteers in the work to develop it.
I wanted to give a shoutout to the project, which I think will radically increase the possibilities for people with reading difficulties or visual impairment to access Wikipedia. I would also love to see our community work towards activating Wikispeech in our languages. That will most likely be a time consuming project, but we need to start somewhere. We could start reaching out to universities and other relevant actors within our networks to identify whether any free voices and speech data already exists. Maybe we could create a small working group around this, to identify what we need to do, when we can do it and who would like to be involved?
Best, ~~~~