Over the past century alone, millions of hours of audiovisual data have been collected with great potential for e.g., new creative productions, research and educational purposes. The actual (re-)use of these collections, however, is severely hindered by their generally limited access. In this paper a framework for improved access to spoken content from the cultural heritage domain is proposed, with a focus on online user interface designs that support access to speech archives. The evaluation of the user interface for an instantiation of the framework is presented, and future work for the adaptation of this first prototype to other collections and archives is proposed. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems, H.5.2. User Interfaces. General Terms Performance, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords Spoken document retrieval; Speech browsing support; User evaluation; Audio transcripts.