How to see an audio player on your own site before you install anything
A bookmark that drops the real WeDispatch player onto your real pages, in your colours, with no account and no change to your site. How it works, what it proves, and what it deliberately does not.
Every vendor of article audio has a demo page, and every demo page looks good. That is the problem: it is their font, their layout, their accent colour. The question you actually need answered is narrower and harder. What will this look like on my article template, next to my headline, in front of my editor-in-chief?
The usual way to find out is to install something on a live site "just to see". That is already a change to production, with whatever sign-off and agency ticket it involves in your organisation. The WeDispatch preview exists to answer the question before any of that.
What you actually do
The preview is a bookmarklet: a bookmark that runs a small script on whatever page you are viewing.
1. On the preview page, drag the green "WeDispatch preview" button into your bookmarks bar (Cmd+Shift+B on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+B on Windows if the bar is hidden). Clicking it there does nothing on purpose; it is meant to be dragged.
2. Open any article on your own site.
3. Click the bookmark. The player appears at the top of the article content, with a small panel explaining what you are looking at.
If you would rather not touch your bookmarks, the same page gives you one line to paste into the browser console. Same result.
Why not just "enter your URL"?
The obvious design would be a box where you paste your address, and a page on our side showing a copy of your site with the player inserted. We decided against it, and the reason is specific.
Our player picks its colours by reading the styles the browser has actually applied to the host page (we explain the mechanism in our piece on a player that adopts your site's colours). On a copy rebuilt on our domain, it would read the copy: a stylesheet that failed to load, a missing web font, a cookie banner sitting on top. The adaptation it showed you would be wrong, and the adaptation is exactly the thing the demo is supposed to demonstrate.
With a bookmarklet, the player runs on your real page, as your visitors see it. It is not a simulation of the result; it is the result. It also avoids two things we did not want to do: re-serving a third party's content from our domain, and having our server fetch an arbitrary address typed in by a stranger.
What it shows you honestly
- The player in place, at its real width, with your typography around it.
- The colour it picked up from that page. A "Details" section in the panel lets you override the colour for the demo and reset it to the detected one, which is handy when two people in the room disagree.
- Real behaviour: play, pause, seek, speed. It is the same player our customers run, not a mock-up.
What it does not show, and says so
The audio is not your article. The player plays the demo recording from our home page, generated by our engine. Voicing your own text would mean extracting it, synthesising it and billing someone who has no account. The panel states this plainly, because a preview that let you believe it had just read your page aloud would be caught out within seconds of listening. To hear your own articles, the free trial produces real audio from them.
The position is not your choice yet. The preview places the player just above the first paragraph of the article body. Once installed, you decide where it goes.
Nothing persists. Everything happens in your browser tab. Nothing is published, no visitor sees it, nothing is saved. Reloading the page removes it, and the panel has a "Remove" button if you want it gone sooner. Clicking the bookmark twice does not create two players; the second click just brings the first one back into focus.
When nothing appears
Some sites forbid outside scripts with a Content-Security-Policy header. That is good security practice, and it is common on large news sites, which is to say among exactly the publishers most likely to want a preview.
The bookmark does not fail silently. It listens for the event the browser fires when it blocks a script, and waits up to four seconds. Then it tells you which of two things happened:
- the site refused the script: your security policy blocked the preview. A real installation does not go through this route; the WordPress plugin or one line in your article template will place the player normally;
- the script did not respond: your site blocked nothing, our file simply did not arrive. Check your connection and try again.
The distinction matters. Without it, a blocked preview looks like "the player does not work on our site", when only the preview is affected.
A practical tip before the meeting
If your site uses several templates (short news item, long-form feature, photo-heavy page), try the preview on each. The colour detected can differ between templates, and it is better to notice that at your desk than in front of a room.
After the preview
The preview answers one question: does this belong on our pages? If it does, the next step is installation. On WordPress, the plugin can also be downloaded without creating an account, and adds the player without editing your theme; the full route is described in our guide to installing it without signing up. On any other platform, it is a single line in your article template.
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