Opening up the Internet to the Visually Impaired

So2Speak.net, a project maintained by Kevin Gisi, took home the Innovation award from Rails Rumble 2008. The application has an interesting premise--providing Internet users with visual impairments with better access to the net.

The site provides a number of feeds to Internet news sites, Twitter feeds and (of course) Ruby and Rails blogs. The difference is that So2Speak provides the information in an audible format. That's right, it reads it aloud. You can even listen to the headers of unread Gmail.

In order to sign up, users will first need to have an OpenID, but after that it's easy enough to pick and choose feeds to hear and to set preferences. The application is still in development (after all, it was a 48-hour creation), so don't expect to be able to customize voices yet. In the future though, maybe you can have all your news read to you by James Bond...