This is great information, but you know, with the VoiceDream app, it almost
becomes a moot point.
Thanks though, I will be investigating this further. the iPhone is not
always the most appropriate platform.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Esther" <[email protected]>
To: "Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2013 9:19 PM
Subject: Re: adding spoken tracks to iTunes
Hi Phil,
One of the useful Services menu options is "Add to iTunes as Spoken Track".
It allows you to highlight a text file selection then have that file turned
into an audio file that gets added to iTunes. If you want to control the
speaking rate, though, you'll need to have a string at the beginning of the
file to put in the speech rate controls within a double set of brackets at
the start of the file, as in:
[[rate 300]]
That's two left brackets (where left bracket is the key to the right of the
"p" key), the word "rate", a space, and a number which is the words per
minute, then two right brackets. In the example used above, the rate is 300
words per minute. I think George was asking about this on list yesterday.
I think you need to check this as one of your active Services, but I don't
recall the default settings, since I have this checked under my Services.
You can find out your checked Services menu options by navigating to the
menu bar (Control-F2 or VO-M), right arrow to your current application
(e.g., could be "Mail" if you're reading this post), press "s" to move to
"Services", right arrow to the submenu, Command-down arrow to the end of the
Services sub-menu, which should be "Services Preferences…" and press return.
This puts you into the correct tab of the keyboard shortcuts under System
Preferences… so you can navigate past the "Shortcuts categories" table
(where "Services" will already be selected and highlighted") to the second
table of shortcuts for that category. One of the options under the text
category is "Add to iTunes as Spoken Track", which you can check, and
optionally assign a shortcut key sequence to.
You select a text file, then either apply your shortcut, or navigate to the
Services menu in the menu bar and select "Add to iTunes as spoken track".
Alternatively, you could use Automator and use the "Text to Audio File"
action, which lets you select a voice, and was a way this could be done
before there was a services menu option.
If you want to learn more about the command arguments that can be used to
control speech, check out the guide at the Apple Developer's Web site for
information on how to embed commands into the text to speed it up or change
other attributes:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SpeechSynthesisProgrammingGuide/index.html
Embedded commands are described in the section titled "Techniques for
Customizing Synthesized Speech" > "Use Embedded Speech Commands to
Fine-Tune Spoken Output". There are a number of four-letter commands in
addition to "rate" that will let you do things like increase or decrease
volume ("volm"), change the way numbers are spoken ("nmbr" with the LTRL
argument to speak digit by digit, as in phone numbers, or with the NORM
argument to go back to the default mode). They can all be used together,
enclose within two left and two right brackets, and separated by
semi-colons. You have to read the strings character by character to hear the
arguments.
If you're comfortable using the Terminal command line, you can test out
commands on speech strings by enclosing them in quotation marks, and using
the unix "say" command. Note that embedded commands cannot be used to
select a voice, although the "v" switch of the "say" command can accept an
argument for the voice.
For example, here's the command to get Fred rather than Alex, speaking fast
at slightly boosted volume, with the "say" command. Open up Terminal, paste
the string in, and press "return" to hear the results:
say -v Fred "[[rate 400; volm +0.2]]Am I speaking too fast?"
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Mar 23, 2013, at 2:30 PM, Phil Halton wrote:
is it the case that you can have a text document read by VoiceOver and
added as a audio file to iTunes?
How exactly is that accomplished?
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