Re: Audio Game Console Sonus Interactive
The thing about TTS is that getting good voice acting is hard. It takes at least one of charisma or cash; one can't just drop by an AVA forum, post an auditions request, and expect to get the team you need.
(Oh, and don't do this without the script completed. Not that I'm speaking from experience, or anything.)
TTS has the advantages that it works with arbitrary text, and the speed, voice, etc can be adjusted to fit the user's needs/preferences.
I'm with you that I'd prefer self-voicing games. I'm pretty sure just about everyone prefers self-voicing games. But it's not always practical, and making it available as a worst-case option would open up game development to more developers (and for a niche device, a bigger library is probably an advantage, so long as there's sufficient quality control. You'd want the boost from devs who can't get the voiceacting a game would need or deserve, even if everyone prefers the games with cenematic voicework.)
There is one other advantage to text-to-speech, in that translating from one language to another becomes much easier. Mainstream console games generally either focus on a single language, or include audio files for every language they support--a huge undertaking for most audio game developers!
Meanwhile, there are a lot of popular Japanese audio games for Windows, thanks to the fact that someone connected NVDA to Google Translate.
But, you know, if you can get a hold of a boatload of Braille Display drivers and can get the Sonus to communicate with those, that'd be awesome, too. It'd be more awesome if my braille display didn't periodically complain about being old by freezing (those things are stupidly expensive to replace), but it's an alternative to text-to-speech (and could show other useful things to boot. I have made lots an d lots of maps for games in braille. It's hard to use while playing a two-handed game, but eh.)
I do sorta feel like we might be talking past each other without realizing it, so I'll reread and try to have more helpful comments soon.
(Eek, and I just remembered that I was at one point trying to make an accessible client for playing 2XL programs a few years ago... why did I never finish that? I have the Batman and X-men tapes somewhere...)
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