First off, if I sound a bit tactless, please forgive me as I have been severely sick for a few days now, but I feel I need to make some points on the issue of which is better, self-voicing games, or games that use screen readers. I'm so tired of screen reader based games. We're already bound to screen readers for everything else as it is, so why should we have to have crappy voice synthesizers in our games too? It's like saying, "okay kiddies, how do you want your yummy carrots today--raw, chopped, sliced and diced, deep fried, pickled, boiled, or have you thought of a nice new way to cook them?" Any way you make 'em, they're still carrots, and any time you make games with voice synthesizers you have that metallic element added. In Tank Commander, the AT&T synths were not used often, and it was like a computer was guiding you, and that fit perfectly with what the game is like. David did the other voices himself. Voice synthesis technology is a very important facet of life as a blind person, but I am beginning to gag on the taste of them as it were. If you can find a truly remarkable synthesizer, one you would actually want to use in a game, be sure that most computers would be too slow to have that synch and Jaws working together. It's funny, but the other day I heard some sighted people complaining about voice synths. They didn't even know it was a voice synth, someone just came up and said, "what's wrong with that lady--she sounds messed up on something." "No," I replied, "that's a voice synthesizer."
Now Kate and Paul, the voices from Neospeech, far outrank Natural Voices and other other synth company's voices to date, but I'd rather you use SAPI to make them work than to have JAWS read them. For one thing, most of us only have the 40 minute demo. For another, some don't have jaws. They have window eyes or Hal, so why tailor make a game for one or two synth programs when SAPI can do it all? As far as reviewing information, the use of the function keys works very well, as in Jim Kitchen's text to Speech hangman. If such keys were made standard from one game to another, and from one company to another, you'd learn each game very rapidly, as you would already know the special hot keys You wouldn't have to adjust the voice, because you'd already have it set up in speech under the control panel in XP and--well, I can't remember about how to do that in other windows operating systems, but how hard would it be to set up a speech file that all SAPI-compliant games could instantly read from and adjust?Having said all that, I'll add one more thing. Voice actors are essential. I hope to get into it again when I massothereapy classes are finished. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
