Good morning. As I write I'm using a good old LT on my Dell desktop. Find
a usb/serial converter which has the FTDI chip set. I got mine from
usbgear.com and it really does the job. I had a converter with the Prolific
chip set and it worked very poorly if at all on machines higher than Pentium
4. When you install the converter the driver will assign the com port.
You'll find the port in device manager under serial/lpt ports. Set WE to
use that port for the LT. Sometimes my LT stops talking but turning it off
and back on restores speech. Sometimes a screen refresh is needed. My LT
is 10 years old and still going strong. I also have one from 1993 or 1994.
I haven't used the LT with my netbook because I only have 1 converter and
that one's always in use on the desktop. I still use the LT even though GW
has made Eloquence and Dectalk WE work very well with WE now. Long live the
Doubletalk!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Belle" <[email protected]>
To: "Samuel Wilkins" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2010 6:22 AM
Subject: Re: DoubleTalk LT and Window-Eyes
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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