Hello all.
I still am very impressed with the voices of Heather and ryan in uS
English. I am buying the full package because with the discount it
isn't much more than just buying infovox ivox. But for a vo user, I
frankly find visiovoice to be problematic at this stage.
1. At least for me, getting the "open" dialog in visiovoice to work
is problematic; in fact, while I've been able to open files from list
mode I haven't yet been able to open one from column mode. I do use
the "open" dialog in some other apps but David says those are
probably cocoa apps while this is a carbon "open" dialog. Of course I
can open by cselecting the file in finder and using "open with" or I
can open from terminal but the fact remains that there are problems
with the "open" dialog at least on my machine.
2. If one listens to a file in visiovoice one can't do anything else,
at least by any method I've tried. If one tries to move with vokeys
or cmd-tab either nothing happens or speech is paused. In addition,
it appears that speech other than vo can cause speech to pause; I've
has to turn off meridian and date-and-time so far and I still haven't
hunted down all the causes of speech pausing. to me, it isn't
practical to have to shut down other programs and do nothing else
with one's computer just to read, no matter how good the voices are.
One can rhijack visiovoice with audio hijack pro but one still has to
start playing from visiovoice and one is again trapped and can't even
switch back to AHP to check progress. And even with the program
hijacked one still has to deal with the causes of speech pausing.
3. Maybe it's possible to convert very short files to audio or maybe
others have had more success than I have had. With the files i've
tried I get up to maybe as much as ten or eleven percent and then I
get the premature quitting of recording and the explanation about the
vo bug in spite of the fact that I haven't touched vo controls or
anything else on my keyboard. One can not use an alternative program
for recording with these voices--at least not that I've yet found.
Cspeech hasn't worked for me with these voices and a program like
books2burn is going to have the same issues as does visiovoice
itself. Furthermore, I am impeded by numerous "busy" signals in the
"convert to audio" dialog of visiovoice.
To summarize, the voices of Heather and Ryan are wonderful and work
beautifully as voiceover voices or even as system voices. The talking
interface of visiovoice is also nice for times when you don't need
vo. But for a totally blind vo user, the reader and the "convert to
audio" features of visiovoice are of limted usefulness at this point--
at least hey are of limited usefulness for this user. I am sure there
will probably be improvements and also it is quite possible that
mileage may vary--others may have more success than I. The concerns I
discuss here are ones that are at least mentioned in the
documentation. But I wanted those who may be considering buying these
programs to have some feedback from a vo user's perspective. The beta
testers on this list may have had much greater success with
visiovoice than I have had and can certainly share their experiences
and workarounds. Granted I haven't tried hunting down and shutting
every single activity on my system that uses speech to get "convert
to audio" to work, but I don't consider it practical to have to do
this on a regular basis even if it works.
--
Cheryl
"Where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also".
