HONcode Newsletter - Feb 2006
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In this issue...
HONcode Newsletter (February 2006)
In this issue...
* The HONcode accreditation seal
* Web Accessibility : access for all
The HONcode accreditation seal
HON has released a HONcode accreditation seal that includes the date of accreditation
of the web site.
The HONcode accreditation is valid one year. After a year, the audit of the site for
its HONcode compliance is systematically performed by HON.
You can update the active seal at:
Web Accessibility : access for all
Along with trustworthiness, accessibility and usability are two of the most important
topics related to the publishing of online medical and health information.
Indeed, the design and the way of providing health and medical information on
the Internet to citizens should be adapted to the needs of all citizens: people
suffering from reading disabilities, visual disabilities, dyslexics, people
with intellectual handicaps, with neurological and physical impairment, elderly,
and patients amongst others. Paradoxically, this group of people use the medical
Internet more and more in order to preserve their wellness, to look for new treatments,
to find suitable advices, to choose their doctor or hospital.
Accessibility can be declined in the following aspects:
? Readability: typeface, size, colour and background (Refer to the NIH check list )
? Speech-enabled web sites
? Multilingualism
? Readability: complexity of the page layout
? Health literacy: complexity of the content
One of the aspects of accessibility is speech-enabled web sites. In order to continue
to meet the needs of Web citizens, HON has set up a few months ago a synthetic voice
with a near-to-human quality voice which reads the content on HON’s Web site.
This service is supplied by ReadSpeaker (www.readspeaker.com). ReadSpeaker speech-enables
web sites in more than 10 languages (from which English, French, Italian and Spanish).
You will find at this link an example on HONcode pages:
Having extensively experienced the integrated speech-enabling system developed by ReadSpeaker,
we inform you that it is very easy to voice-enable a site in order to improve its accessibility.
As member of the HONcode community, you can benefit from a special offer proposed
by ReadSpeaker only to Health Web sites accredited by HON.
For further information, please contact directly:
Disclaimer: HON is a customer of ReadSpeaker but has no other commercial relationship with ReadSpeaker.
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