Privacy Policy

What this policy covers

• Part 1 — the browser extension. Installed from the Chrome, Firefox or Safari add-on stores and controlled by the person using it. Read this part if you installed Web Reader yourself.
• Part 2 — the embedded widget. Loaded from webreader.abair.ie by a website you are visiting, because that site's operator chose to add it. Read this part if you operate such a site, or if you met Web Reader on someone else's website.

Neither form collects personally identifiable information, assigns an identifier, requires an account, tracks browsing across sites, or uses analytics, telemetry or advertising. Neither one sets cookies.

Part 1

The browser extension

Data processed

Selected text. When you activate the extension, the text you have selected, or the main article text of the current page, is sent to the ABAIR speech synthesis service at synthesis.abair.ie to generate audio. The text is sent one passage at a time as a query parameter on a GET request. The address of the page you are reading is not sent. The audio returned is played in your browser, held in memory for the current session, and is not retained by the extension.

Voice list. The list of Irish voices and dialects is built into Web Reader; it is not fetched from a server while you read. (Earlier versions of this policy stated that api.abair.ie is contacted for voice metadata. It is not. The extension keeps host access to that address so a future release can retrieve an updated voice list; the embedded widget never contacts it at all.)

Preferences. The extension uses your browser's local storage (chrome.storage.sync) to remember your settings: voice, dialect, playback speed, panel position, accessibility options, and keyboard shortcuts. These settings remain in your browser. Chrome may synchronise them across your own signed-in installations; the extension does not operate its own server.

Hosted documents. If you read a Google Docs document, the extension asks Google for that document's plain-text export using the session you are already signed in to, so the text can be read aloud. The text is then handled exactly like any other page text. Nothing about the document is sent to ABAIR beyond the passages being synthesised.

The extension does not collect personally identifiable information, does not track browsing, and does not use analytics, telemetry, or advertising.

Permissions

• activeTab — read text from the current page when you activate the extension.
• storage — save your settings locally.
• Host access to synthesis.abair.ie and api.abair.ie — communicate with the ABAIR speech service.
• Host access to docs.google.com and *.googleusercontent.com — retrieve the text of a Google Docs document you have open, so it can be read aloud.

Part 2

The embedded widget on third-party websites

Who is responsible for what

The site operator decides to install Web Reader, chooses its configuration, and is responsible for informing their visitors — including disclosing this processing in their own privacy notice and obtaining any consent their own law requires. In data-protection terms the operator is the controller for the text of their pages.

ABAIR (Trinity College Dublin) operates the speech synthesis service that turns the submitted text into audio, and the server that hosts the widget script. ABAIR processes the submitted passages only to produce the audio returned in the same response. ABAIR is separately responsible, as controller, for the ordinary operational logs of its own servers described below.

Web Reader is provided free of charge as a public-good research service and is offered without a separate data-processing agreement. Operators who need a formal arrangement, or who handle special-category or confidential text, should contact ABAIR before deploying the widget.

What leaves the visitor's browser

Page text, when a visitor presses play. Nothing is sent until the visitor starts reading. From then on, the passage being read — the text they selected, or the page's main text, split into sentences or paragraphs — is sent from the visitor's browser directly to https://synthesis.abair.ie/api/synthesise. Passages just ahead of the current position may be requested in advance so playback does not stall.

The text travels in the URL. The ABAIR service takes a GET request, so the passage is carried as a query parameter (input=), together with the chosen voice, speed, and a normalisation flag. Text in a URL is more exposed than text in a request body: it can appear in web-server access logs and in any intermediary that logs URLs. Do not place the widget on pages whose visible text is confidential, or which display personal data such as account details, correspondence or health information.

Your site's address is visible to ABAIR. Because the request is cross-origin, the browser attaches a Referer header. Under browsers' default referrer policy this is the origin of the embedding site (for example https://example.ie) rather than the full page address, so ABAIR can see which site a request came from, but not which page or which query string. A site operator who does not want even the origin disclosed can send a stricter Referrer-Policy (such as no-referrer) for their pages.

What comes back. The response contains the synthesised audio only. It is played through the browser's Web Audio API, kept in memory for the current page view so a repeated passage is not re-requested, and discarded when the page is closed. No audio is stored on the visitor's device.

No account, login, cookie or identifier is involved in any of this. Requests carry no user id, and ABAIR has no way to link two requests to the same visitor.

What is stored in the visitor's browser

The widget remembers a visitor's reading preferences in your own site's localStorage — first-party storage on your domain, not on abair.ie. It writes only keys with these prefixes:

• webreader_embed_sync__* — panel settings that would sync across devices in the installed extension: voice, dialect, speed, highlight style, panel position and collapsed state, accessibility options.
• webreader_embed_local__* — per-device state, such as transient UI state.
• webreader-language — the chosen interface language (Irish or English).

These are preference values chosen by the visitor. They contain no identifier, are never transmitted to ABAIR or anyone else, and are removed when the visitor clears site data for your domain. No cookies are set by the widget or by webreader.abair.ie. In most jurisdictions storage strictly necessary to remember an accessibility preference the user has just expressed does not require consent, but the assessment is the site operator's to make.

Third-party content: the Teanglann dictionary

Web Reader offers an optional dictionary lookup: double-clicking an Irish word opens a small panel containing an <iframe> pointing at https://www.teanglann.ie. When that happens the visitor's browser contacts teanglann.ie directly, disclosing to that site the word looked up, the visitor's IP address, and the address of the page they were on. Teanglann is operated by Foras na Gaeilge, not by ABAIR, and its own privacy terms apply.

In the embedded widget this feature is locked off by default — it is absent from the panel, and nothing on your site can reach teanglann.ie through the widget. A site operator who wants to offer it can set disableTeanglann: false in the widget configuration; even then, no request is made until a visitor turns lookup on and double-clicks a word.

Loading the widget itself

Fetching https://webreader.abair.ie/script.js is an ordinary HTTP request from the visitor's browser. Like any web server, and like the content delivery network in front of it, ABAIR's server may record standard request metadata — IP address, timestamp, user agent, and the referring site — in operational logs kept for reliability, abuse prevention and security. These logs are not used to build profiles, are not combined with the text submitted for synthesis, and are not shared for advertising. Serving the script sets no cookie.

Operators who prefer that their visitors make no request to ABAIR for the script can pin a specific version, or host a copy of the bundle themselves; either way the speech synthesis requests still go to synthesis.abair.ie, because that is where the voices run.

Contact

ABAIR is a project of the Phonetics and Speech Laboratory at Trinity College Dublin. For questions about this policy, see www.abair.ie.