Text to speech on a website?

I ran across this site the other day and it uses audio voice to literally read the text of the site. How is this done? And can it be done reasonably easy?

http://www.e-com.sbdc.com.au/e-trade/ge ... ningScreen

That's just a recording on someone reading the page out loud, embedded into the page using Flash. Very simple to do with a little flash know-how, though you'll have to get someone to read the page (or do it yourself) first, and record it.

If you wanted to do it on a larger scale, it would take a while to record all the audio files for the different pages, but for a single page like that, no problem.

To use tts technology to voice-enable a web site check out http://www.readspeaker.com. ReadSpeaker speech-enables web sites in up to 19 languages. To use ReadSpeaker, you need to insert their html code into the CMS of your web site.

Keep in mind that while a something like ReadSpeaker or a screen-reader will read the page aloud, it won't sound quite as natural as a recording of a human reading the page would. (If you listen to e-Trade's reading as compared to the example on ReadSpeaker, you'll notice that e-Trade sounds much more natural, because it's being read by an actual person, rather than an automated voice.)

It still works, of course, and is a great option if you need a large site to be read top the user (though most users who need a page read aloud to them will already be using a screen-reader, so having your site do it would be largely unnecessary).