freshtrax

Hitachi’s ZoomSight is a tool to help those with low vision or difficulty in distinguishing between colors to browse website content more quickly and conveniently.

Features:

• Zoom Scale
  Magnifies text and pictures from 50% to 300% for better readability, especially useful for the elderly

• Display Color
  Black on White, White on Black and Invert Color options all make it easier for users to read content depending on the user’s specific sight impairment

• Text-To-Speech
  Reads out web pages using a sophisticated synthetic speech engine

• Pronunciation Guide*
  Adds hiragana or romaji pronunciation on top of kanji or katakana characters within Japanese pages, making them faster to comprehend

  *Currently, “Pronunciation Guide” is only available in the Japanese version.

Text-To-Speech is a compelling and very much anticipated feature – if it  becomes widely adopted on the mobile platform, it could solve some presentation issues by allowing users to directly listen to a website instead of reading or to listen to content like a blog podcast style while walking around.

If this solution gains wide acceptance in Japan it’s sure to spread to English and other major languages as it gets rolled out in more devices.

btrax is a cross-cultural branding and web consulting firm with services for design, mobile, and social media. We specialize on projects between the US, Japan and China markets. Enthusiastic about those topics too? Follow us on Twitter and Facebook!