Thanks FreeDOS community for such a heartening, community-minded response to Felix's situation. It's amazing, well done team and I hope that one or multiple satisfactory solutions can be worked out for sight-impaired users. Imagine if the Aladdin's Cave of archived IF (interactive fiction) software for DOS could be turned into an interactive audiobook resource for *everyone* on the sighted spectrum, with the efforts of those mentioned in this thread. Felix, until a useful outcome is reached for you and others in the FreeDOS environment, can I also suggest to you the efforts of Tim Cadogan-Cowper on "Fabularium", an open-source IF reader and organization application tool for Android 4.1+ . Best,
------------------------------------------------------------------ Web: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EMQxfgYAAAAJ http://uq.academia.edu/AndrewRobins https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrew_Robins2/ On Mon, Mar 16, 2020, at 8:20 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote: > Again, ignore Eric, he has no first hand experiencing coding screen > readers to do anything let alone using them.. > One can resolve some of these issues by using the actual drivers provided > by the actual programs themselves. > My understanding from Joseph, is that he has coded the b&S which stands > for braille and speak, to function using tinytype and asap screen readers > as a out of the box install for Freedos. In fact he got permission on > list. > > Karen, who is using a dectalk, right now. > > > > On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote: > > > > > Hi Mateusz, > > > >> Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy > >> as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on > >> a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" > >> written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. > > > >> PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, > >> DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these > >> names mean anything to me. > > > > A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX > > tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm > > but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things > > char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large > > number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth > > brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local > > CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the > > PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles > > with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. > > > > I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced > > charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in > > some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character. > > > > DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links: > > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk > > > > My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a > > phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech > > synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text. > > > > There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal > > PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with > > a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking > > calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the > > TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This > > is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say. > > > > Regards, Eric > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Freedos-user mailing list > > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
