Speed Listening at 900 words per minute VoiceMarketing

My guest this week is Sina Barham, founder of Prima Access Computing.

Show Notes
Guest
Sina Bahram, Founder and President of Prime Access Computing

Host
Host: Doug Schumacher
Website: Arrovox.com/VoiceMarketing
Twitter: @MemeRunner

Prime Access Computing Website
https://pac.bz

Transcript
Intro
Doug:

Welcome to VoiceMarketing. I’m Doug Schumacher, and on today’s episode, we have a very special guest. Sina Barham.

Sina does what you might call speed listening using a TTS engine. And he’s getting up to some pretty remarkable speeds, which we’re going to go through in the podcast.

It’s a fascinating discussion about speed listening with TTS engines, voice assistant UX, and the future of audio as the primary format for content consumption.

Sina’s going to give a brief overview of his background, but a couple of things that he didn’t mention that I want to, are,

In 2012, Sina was recognized as a White House Champion of Change by President Barack Obama, for his work enabling users with disabilities to succeed in the STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

In 2015, Sina was recognized as an Emerging Leader in Digital Accessibility at the annual Knowbility Heroes of Accessibility Awards.

In 2017, Sina served as co-chair of the Museums and the Web conference. And in 2019, Sina started serving as an invited expert on the W3C ARIA working group.

So let’s get right into it. Here’s my conversation with Sina Barham.

Interview
VoiceMarketing.m4a

Doug: Sina,

Sina: Hi how’s it going.

Doug Hey good to talk to you too. So let’s go ahead of giving people a quick overview of you.

But why don’t you introduce yourself and give us a quick quick background of your history your education work all that stuff.

Sina; Sure. I run a company called prime access consulting or PAC Casey for short. We’re based out of Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

And Kerry and a lot of what we do is focus on inclusive design and accessibility is one of those outcomes of inclusive design so we look at processes whether it’s software whether it’s inside of a museum or university or startup. What have you. On how we can make things available to the widest possible audience. That means things like tech signs that means things like making sure programs like a screen reader can access content but it also means you know physical considerations for getting around an exhibit or getting around a service offering from from a company and just really trying to work with designers developer boards of trustees. What have you on making sure that these various afford says we’re designing and we’re putting on into the world are as accessible as possible. I got into this work because of my background in computer science so my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in computer science. I’m a BD and a Ph.D. in computer science and in a field called Human Computer Interaction and. I happen to be blind. So a lot of my time in grad school was spent at the beginning not wanting to go into accessibility not wanting to go into inclusive design because I kind of felt it was pretty stereotypical as the blind guy to go into accessibility I wanted to do a lot of other things but I got really frustrated with a lot of the tools I had to use and a lot of the various things that people were claiming were accessible and in fact really were not where I knew the technology to be able to be or where I knew the software capabilities were what we’re able to achieve. And so I started getting into designing solutions in the space and then brought in that not only for persons with disabilities or people who use assistive technologies but really for everyone so that we can make experiences that...