Re: How do screen readers work when there's a console and a normal window?
It's worth noting at this point that your idea of horrible can often be our idea of great. If I had eloquence samples to post, I'd point you at them--to the sighted user, they're both equally horrid as far as I know, but Eloquence is the most popular synth among this crowd. One of my biggest annoyances (as well as that of many others) is the current push towards natural voices. To many (if not a majority, then at least very close to one) of us, it's not about natural. It's an I/O method and, like other I/O methods like typing, needs to be fast.
I'd say that most of us would agree with me in saying that--to a blind person with a blind person's priorities--flite is an extra special sort of hell. We train to these synths over time and the top priority is productivity--and, unfortunately, you don't get both fast and natural.
Just be careful when applying your evaluations. Compared to you, our evaluat
ions are basically blue and orange morality. if you don't want to call the screen readers directly on Windows, then please leave the clipboard method in--I guarantee you that half of us will end up using it over flite or SAPI.
Since I was the prime example, at least for a little while, I'll mention it. With Espeak, I used to go 1217 words a minute for casual computer operation, basic programming, etc. For novels it was 1051. These numbers dropped because you can only do that when your life is such that you have spare energy, it's almost meditative, and I have never met a sighted person who could even recognize it as words. I can still do it, if I have to, but am a bit out of practice. I am now in the ball park of the sane speed of 800 words a minute or so because my life got busy and I'm not always 100% awake and perky these days, and as far as
I know, that speed is most of us (including the developer of NVDA). yet again, most sighted people are hard pressed to even see it as words.
We have got to prepare some samples and actually collect data on this as a community at some point--sighted people never quite understand what it's truly like, and it's very irritating that I don't have a link to provide when these conversations inevitably come up. Just think of it like this: for every day of our lives, for every activity that involves a pencil or writing, we're quite probably using a synth. Now imagine if that synth was "natural", at the cost of topping out around 200 words a minute or so, disable your ability to glance or read a few words ahead or skip in any meaningful way, and you will begin to understand. Some of us go that slow, but it's really a rarity among the kind of person who would be able to set this up in the first place.
P.S: I am in no way sayi
ng that clipboard isn't good enough. Clipboard is good enough, but I wish to forestall you removing it and replacing it with flite. Also to aid understanding of the synth issue generally, and why we don't consider Espeak to be nearly as bad as you do.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
