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An Open Source Web Reader for Under-Resourced Languages

We have developed an open source web reader in Iceland for under-resourced languages. The web reader was developed due to the need for a free and good quality web reader for languages which fall outside the scope of commercially available web readers. It relies on a text-to-speech (TTS) pipeline accessed via a cloud service. The web reader was developed using the Icelandic TTS voices Alfur and Dilja, but could be connected to any language which has a TTS pipeline. The design of our web reader focuses on functionality, adaptability and user friendliness. Therefore, the web reader’s feature set heavily overlaps with the minimal features necessary to provide a good web reading experience while still being extensible enough to be adapted to work for other languages, high-resourced and under-resourced. The web reader works well on all the major web browsers and has a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level AA: Acceptable compliance, meaning that it works well for the largest user groups, people in under-resourced languages with visual impairments and difficulty reading. The code for our web reader is available and published with an Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/cadia-lvl/WebRICE, which includes a simple demo of the project.