Hi Niophyte.
The first thing to note is that winfrotz tts is only a partially completed
version of the software, ---- it's also only based on an earlier version of
win frotz 4.5 I believe, so some features which were planned never seemed to
make it into the final release annoyingly.
as to your questions:
1: Yes, some of the features such as cutting of speech can be helpful,
however others are less so. I myself find winfrotz tts useful for
instantanious reading of text which is printed to the screen rather than me
having to physically move Hal's focus around to read the latest entry, ----
though quite often i keep Hal running at the same time as win frotz tts so
that I can perform more minute reading tasks, eg finding the name of a given
object.
2: not as much with a screen reader, though you do have to read manually. In
tts however, can significantly improve the situation by removing extranious
clutter from the screen,for instance turning the header flag off and also
turning off fast scrolling sinse this seems to interfere with the speech.
It's also a good idea to try and get as much on a single screen as possible
to avoid shenanigans with scrolling the screen downwards.
3: oncemore, this is not possible in win frotz tts. Screen readers however
do have settings to not read punctuation marks (though these are more
difficult to set in some programs than in others). For instance, I have Hal
currently set to read me punctuation when I am typing or using read line or
other area commands, but to ignore punctuation when I am on continuous
document read or navigating other areas of the screen. This cuts down on
clutter a fair amount. Oh, even if hal does read punctuation, it also has
the ability to say "underline 27 times" which is significantly helpful as
well.
4: Well, if reading the screan manually with a screen reader it really
doesn't matter about the greater than prompt particularly, ---- in fact I've
personally got used to typing whenever I get to greater than and would find
some sort of hard coded message rather odd. In win frotz tts, usually the
best you can do is turn off the status line display.
I have heard of other interpreters with built in self voicing actually, but
the only one I've significantly tried is win frotz tts really. Then again, I
was playing if games quite a while before i discovered accessible audio
games and the like, and that was on a laptop running windows 95 which had no
speech capacity and thus I had to use my screen reader.
On that I played a lot of the classics, pluss a lot of stuff by people like
Andrew plotkin and emily short.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
---
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