The First Speaking Syrian Blog

SMN No. 12, January 6, 2011

A Syrian young blogger has recently added a new service to his blog,
Ahmad blogs, which enables blind people to hear what he has to say.
The blogger wrote on January 2 that he had been thinking about how to
make his blog accessible for blind people since 2002. He enquired
website companies about ways of creating websites that support people
with special needs, but never got very far.

He said he continued to search for alternatives but those he found, such
as speaking browsers, were not available in Arabic. He then came across
the foundation Speech Workers, which is concerned with the development
of techniques to convert words into spoken audio files automatically. He
is now using the technique on his blog.

The blogger says that this service is for blind and people who are
visually impaired, or even for those who are too busy to read while
browsing the internet.

He ensured that he will continue developing his blog, until it contains
a comprehensive system which enables blind people to read everything in
the blog,”as if they can see it”.

He hoped that this technique in the future will be applied in every
Arabic website and every blog, in order to make “support of people with
special needs not only a fashion from time to time, but a general
humanitarian concern which is indispensable online”.

The blogger, born in 1983, started blogging in 2005, and his writings
covers wide field from technical internet subjects, to Islamic and
cultural subjects.