An Open Source Web Reader for Under-Resourced Languages

Judy Fong, Þorsteinn Daði Gunnarsson, Sunneva Þorsteinsdóttir, Gunnar Thor Örnólfsson, Jon Gudnason


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2022.sigul-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Maite Melero, Sakriani Sakti, Claudia Soria
Venue:
SIGUL
SIG:
SIGUL
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
10–15
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigul-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Judy Fong, Þorsteinn Daði Gunnarsson, Sunneva Þorsteinsdóttir, Gunnar Thor Örnólfsson, and Jon Gudnason. 2022. An Open Source Web Reader for Under-Resourced Languages. In Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages, pages 10–15, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
An Open Source Web Reader for Under-Resourced Languages (Fong et al., SIGUL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigul-1.2.pdf
Code
 cadia-lvl/webrice