Hey Samuel,
Good choice on the doubletalk.
We've used those for years, and all our new machines we carefully
bought and configured have bios level serial ports, ;yes you can
still get those.
they allow for low level access with dos and linux, and also high
level access with windows,
Obviously, your usb based serial port won't allow the lower level
access, but rest assured, it's worth having an external speech synth
for just the reasons you outlined, speech crashes more often with
sapi than it does with direct dedicated text to speech hardware.
if you want to spend a little more money, a tripple talk with both
usb and serial port will give you the best of all worlds,
one cable for power and data if you go the usb route, and no
adapters, and if your ever planning on ;using another screenreader
like jaws, which has very bad serial port support for the doubletalk,
they haven't fixed their drivers and probably never will.
so you'll want that usb support for an external synth if your going
to work in windows.
if your going to not use jaws at all, and just use window-eyes, your
ok with a doubletalk.
Also, I am told to stay away from certain chip sets with serial to
usb adapters, gw and others can tell you more, but certain ones don't
work very well.
But usb to serial adapters do indeed need drivers.
But native serial port machines, where you have a header on the
motherboard, and a ribbon cable
to a bracket with a serial port do not need any extra drivers.
This is why I don't like to buy bargain machines, and I like to pick
out motherboards which have the legacy support I desire along with
the newer hardware advancements even if it costs you a little more,
your better off in the long run if your going to do anything
non-standard, and not just follow the herd and
use a hardware speech synth.
Good luck with it all.
At 05:34 AM 8/28/2010, Samuel Wilkins wrote:
Hello everyone, I will be getting a Doubletalk LT speech synthesizer
to use with Window-Eyes, as I will be using some very resource
intensive software applications and I feel that a hardware
synthesizer will eat up fewer resources than a software one.
Furthermore, I may be going onto the student radio station at
University and I feel that the hardware synthesizer will be good for
that, as well as for presentations. Finally, I have chosen this
particular synthesizer because it runs on a plug and play system,
IE, it does not require drivers installed. The synthesizer runs via
a serial port, however I have been told by RC Systems that it will
work with a serial to USB converter. My question is, if I want to
use it with a serial to USB converter, what port do I tell
Window-Eyes it is connected to so it will find it? Thank you in advance.
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