SHROPSHIRE company ROK Entertainment believes it has discovered the “holy grail” of making websites accessible to all after launching “killer” software which could revolutionise the way millions of people use the internet.
The company, based in Albrighton with a particular interest in technologies for the mobile phone, is already a world leader in streamed and on-demand television for mobiles.
But it is the firm’s launch of ROKTalk which is creating waves in the technology world.
Managing director Jonathan Kendrick said: “There are two holy grails, one is converting text to speech and the other is speech to text.
“We have been investigating these two areas for some time and in our research into text to speech we uncovered there were three services out there which were world class.
Enormous
“One was way ahead of the others, Textic, and we liked it so much we bought it. The scale and scope of this is huge. The acquisition of Textic represents an enormous opportunity on many levels, not least for the benefit of the blind or partially-sighted, but also for the under-educated and illiterate as well as millions of people affected by dyslexia worldwide.”
Earlier this year, a giant of corporate America, Target, was brought to its knees after it was successfully sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act for failing to make its website accessible to the blind.
ROK understands similar moves are under way across Europe, although companies, Government, local authorities and charities are currently only “encouraged” to ensure accessibility.
Textic, relaunched as ROKTalk, is already in use on several local authority and public sector websites in the UK and ROK is pushing its sale globally.
Mr Kendrick said: “We are pushing this very hard in America because there is a legal obligation to ensure websites are accessible, and we are pushing website owners in Britain to adopt early.
“Shropshire has a world-class piece of software and we have a major task on our hands to convince millions of website owner to install ROKTalk.
“We have a pricing matrix, deliberately designed to undercut our competitors and it’s not a uniform price. ROKTalk is priced depending on whether you’re a corporate, charity or Government website and costs anywhere from around £120 up to several thousands of pounds.
“We have several hundred websites already from a standing start, our goal is several million worldwide. We intend to gift ROKTalk to every school for the blind in the UK for life.
£500 million
“And if we sell for an average of £500 and one million websites, that’s £500 million a year. Our mandate is one million websites, we know 180 million websites globally which should or would utilise ROKTalk, so that’s less than one per cent.
“ROK has been around for five or six years and we know we have on our hands the ‘killer’ application, and we will grow accordingly.”
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