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Chrome Extension developers that want to add synthesized speech to extensions and Chrome-packaged apps are in luck. Google announced a new Text-to-Speech API for Chrome extensions yesterday, with examples and two sample voices.

According to Google engineer Dominic Mazzoni, a few hacks have enabled text-to-speech already. This involves tricks like sending text to a remote server and returning an MP3 that's played back with HTML5 audio. Smart approach in lieu of an official way to do it, but now Google has an easier (and less bandwidth-intensive) way.

Google has announced a new initiative to increase accessibility for visually challenged users on its major Web services. In advance of the upcoming school year, Google is rolling out accessibility improvements to Docs, Sites and Calendars. Google is hosting a live webinar for enterprise customers - which include educational institutions - on Wednesday, September 21 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific time.

The enhancements include new keyboard shortcuts and enhanced screen reader support. Google says it has "worked closely with advocacy organizations for the blind to improve our products with more accessibility enhancements" over the past few months, and that more changes are on the way. "We believe that people who depend on assistive technologies deserve as rich and as productive an experience on the web as sighted users," says T.V. Raman, Google's technical lead on accessibility, "and we're working to help that become a reality."

Today marks the second annual "Blue Beanie Day," an international online event in support of web design standards and accessibility. Participants post photos of themselves wearing blue beanies, or stocking caps, to their various online accounts in honor of web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman's blue beanie dominated the photo on the cover of his widely loved 2003 book, Designing With Web Standards.

We're big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll tell you why.