Hi,
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.
DN: There are definitely a number of issue, as reported in the manual and documentation, but it looks like our VoiceOver using beta testers have had more luck getting things to work reasonably well that you have so far. Maybe they can share some tips.
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.
DN: The problems with the Open dialog are not just on your machine (see manual) and they are caused by bugs on Apple's part. Basically, any Carbon application that uses an Open dialog will have the same issues and sadly there is nothing I can do about it short of completely rewriting VisioVoice in Cocoa (which is on my to-do list; and yes, it will be part of a free upgrade). It wasn't until late in development that I discovered these issues and I have discussed them with Apple's Carbon engineers and there is really no solution until they fix this in a future Mac OS X release.
DN: Now some of you will ask why I did not develop this application in Cocoa in the first place. Well, Apple has always told developers that both Carbon and Cocoa applications can be made to be fully accessible through VoiceOver as long as the developers do their job right. I have always found this to be true, that is until I discovered that the Carbon Open and Save dialogs are full of unknown elements and hard to navigate with VoiceOver. Apple has also suggested that when applications use standard elements they will be accessible right out of the box. So I had no reason to expect problems when developing VisioVoice as the Open and Save dialogs are standard elements. I did not realize that there are two version of that standard element and that only the Cocoa version had been well tested with VoiceOver.
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.
DN: This is once more cause by an Apple bug that affects in this case both Cocoa and Carbon applications. It is caused by an arbitration mechanism in Mac OS X that Apple controls and clearly has not though through sufficiently. The effect is that third party speech can be interrupted by VoiceOver and some other Apple speech. The idea is that users don't want to hear multiple voices at the same time. Obviously, for an application such as VisioVoice this becomes very frustrating as you can't multitask with VoiceOver running. The most silly part of it is that even speech send to an audio file gets interrupted on the current Mac OS X version.
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.
DN: As I wrote to you off list, I have not seen these issues and am under the impression that severl of the blind beta testers were able to successfully out put bigger and smaller files. Maybe they can provide some insight on this. In the mean time I will be in touch after Apple expo to try sort this out with you to find out what exactly is causing the busy signals and the interruptions.
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.
DN: Cheryl, I appreciate your off-list and on-list feedback and think you have raised some very valid issues. I am really curious about some of the beta tester's perspective on some of these issues, as some of them did seem to be able to work quite well with VisioVoice. As I see it the major issues you are experiencing, the inability to multitask and listen to speech because speech gets interrupted, and the Open and Save dialogs are sadly issues beyond my immediate control. I do expect things to be quite a bit better in Leopard, but that does not help you today.
Thanks, david. -- -------------------------------------------------------------- David Niemeijer, CTO AssistiveWare(R) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.assistiveware.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------
