Nestlé : Listening device

A sound device lacks clear reason.

The Site

Nestlé, the Switzerland-based foods and confectionery group, has embedded an audio service in many parts of its corporate website.

Nestlé provides a Listen to this article facility on individual pages across its website, mostly but not exclusively in the responsibility (Creating Shared Value), About us and Investors sections. The service, delivered by free Dewplayer technology, is accessed from a simple control panel located at the top of the page between the headline and content. As well as play, stop and reset buttons, users have the option to ‘Download as mp3’.

The narrative covers all page content as it appears, so can include tables, contact details, links and downloads in addition to text. The female speaking voice is machine generated, which regularly leads to elision, slurring of words and oddly spaced phrasing. There are several other speech impediments related to numbers: dates are sometimes read out as standard numbers (for example, 1867 is one thousand eight hundred and sixty seven); large amounts are broken down (for example, 109,908 becomes one-hundred-and-nine nine-hundred-and-eight); post codes are recited literally (for example, CH-1800 is cee aitch minus one thousand eight hundred).

The Takeaway

At first glance Nestlé’s listening post looks like a good idea – think webcasts and podcasts extending through background facts and figures to social responsibility case studies or the innovations history. It doesn’t need an extended listen, though, to realise the considerable limitations on the quality of the broadcast. Most can be traced to the machine-generation of speech, which can’t reproduce the flow of natural narration and simply reads everything in front of it in order. But this is compounded in places by unsympathetic configuration of content, such as the use of a word space rather than a comma or full point in large numbers, which effectively splits them into two unrelated (to the machine) numbers, and inappropriate deployment (try following the five-year tables in Investors’ Financial Overview).

Nestlé’s stated commitment to meeting accessibility standards for its website may be one reason for embedding Dewplayer around the site. Except, people who can’t read will have their own screenreaders. Besides, the selectivity of deployment (unlike a text size adjuster it is not a universal utility) and download feature suggest it is not the sole or primary motivation. Which raises a question Nestlé might not want to hear: what’s the point?

First published on 11 March, 2010