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Annual Report 2024/Story: Wikispeech takes off again

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Det här är en översatt version av sidan Verksamhetsberättelse 2024/Story: Wikispeech tar fart igen. Översättningen är till 100 % färdig och uppdaterad.
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2024

In this Story, we focus on how we, through the project A Wikispeech for everybody, secured our largest project grant ever to further develop Wikispeech, an open-source text-to-speech solution, as well as a broader initiative to improve digital accessibility.

Wikispeech is a solution, developed by Wikimedia Sverige, for making Wikipedia more accessible to people who, for various reasons, prefer to listen to content rather than read it. It is based on an open-source text-to-speech solution, adapted for Wikipedia and built according to the same principles as Wikipedia. This means that as a user, you should be able to improve how an article sounds if you discover any errors. To make it possible to cost-effectively scale Wikispeech to all the languages supported by Wikipedia later on, we are also developing a speech data collecting tool.

In the fall of 2024, A Wikispeech for everybody received funding from the Swedish Inheritance Fund to further develop Wikispeech. The three-year, 10 million SEK grant is our largest project grant ever. In this project, we will work together with several other actors who are leading in speech technology or work with accessibility for people with disabilities. This ensures that we can develop the best possible tool. A central part of the project is also the Accessibility Academy, where collaboration with organizations and volunteers plays a crucial role. Through this initiative, different groups will be involved in testing the tools and contributing to the development of speech data. However, this is only one aspect of the Accessibility Academy, which will also do training and activities to foster understanding and engagement among the public and experts regarding online accessibility issues. You can read more about it in our Annual Plan for 2025.

Securing funding for the project was a year-long effort, the success of which depended on several factors beyond having a good project idea. First and foremost, the association had the necessary resources to invest a significant number of working hours into the application process, thanks to the unrestricted operational funding it receives from the Wikimedia Foundation. This enabled persistence, both during the various iterations of the application and earlier in the process of identifying a funder for the project idea. Over the past decade, the association has also gained a lot of experience in developing successful grant applications. This includes understanding the need to refine a project idea and adapt it to align with the societal changes the funder aims to achieve. It also involves identifying how the project can strengthen other areas of ours or the movement's work. Finally, our strong and flexible project partners were able to navigate the various turns of the process.

A Wikispeech for Everybody evolved from an almost purely software-based project into one that spans many of the association’s strengths and experiences. This includes MediaWiki development, work with language data and lexicographical resources on Wikidata, collaboration with content partners and other Wikimedia organizations, crowdsourcing, and advocacy work.