WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: best text to speech ap to show my non-geek sighted friends?

for

From: Phil Teare
Date: Mar 2, 2008 5:30PM

Cheers

On 02/03/2008, shawn klein < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> OK Phil. I'll be looking forward to trying it when the
> instructions are accurate. Yes 400 ms is mighty slow
> when you're used to a response time from a screen
> reader that seems instantaneous, but I know full well
> why it's this way when the screen reader is on a
> server half a world away.


Exactly, however, like I say, we're working on reducing latencies
considerably further. Which is coming on pretty well :)


I'd expect it to be a
> virtual tortoise through a dial-up connection, given
> the fidelity of the voice,


Its not too bad, and we have various compression formats to go at. Though
currently default is the the fairly hi fi mp3 you're hearing.


I'm
> wondering how it'll work without an input mode?


Basically it will simply automatically disable those keys which would
usually be used for input in an input/editable element, but retains those
that aren't. It'll make sense when you play with it.


Yeah the ability to change the voice, and
> the speed of the voice, would be awesome.


On the roadmap, but not sure where. It may fall into 3.x (next year) for
tech reasons I can't go into.


Later I'll
> sign up and try that. I wonder what voice that is?


You're probably hearing UK Loquendo voices (female is more natural and the
male more intelligible), but we use several. I personally still like some
low end voices for reading research stuff (where accuracy and therefore
intelligibility is more important).



> could change every single mispronounced word in the
> dictionaries, but I'm a bit lazy in that regard.


As are most people, which is one of the really cool things about Talklets 2.
You can simply right click on a word (key access is coming very soon - prob
2.5), and submit as mispronounced. We correct it for you. Later we plan to
allow suggested alterations to be submitted (users submitting the phonetic
corrections themselves), and then vetted by other users (all very web 2.0 -
and should build a very cool lexicon db, ours is already many thousands of
entries big, with just us making corrections).


Well, I don't know which text is cached and which
> isn't, but it might be useful to A. have the system
> beep when the user has pressed a key but has happened
> on blank space with nothing to read, and b. a sort of
> rising series of beeps while uncached text is loading,
> like the beeps you hear with NVDA while a page is
> loading.


Another one for the road map (which I could swear it was on, but somehow has
vanished... ). Yes a filler would be useful.


why don't you use arrow key navegation
> as well?


Simply not added yet. But again, they're there in the roadmap for 2.5 (late
summer)


Thanks
> Shawn


No problem

Phil


--
> Phil Teare,
> CTO & Chief Architect,
> http://www.talklets.com from Textic Ltd.
> (44) [0] 208 4452871