Hello all
On Aug 25, 2009, at 12:29 AM, David Niemeijer wrote:

> as Scott pointed out, space on the DVD alone
> would already preclude all such voices to be high quality. All Infovox
> iVox voices together already pretty much fill up a dual layer DVD so
> there would be little space left for the OS :-)

No one is saying they should be high quality.  The iPhone voices would  
suffice.  The iPhone not only has a large number of different language  
voices, but a decent supply of regional voices within those languages  
as well.  It seems like they would have been a bit more stingy if they  
took up so much space.

I guess the point was mainly that at this point, the apple out-of-the- 
box solution for blind users is only available to those who speak  
English comfortably, and who have enough money to fork over for high  
quality acapella voices.  And what of the rest of the people out  
there?  Well they are out of luck for the time being.
>
> I also want to take this opportunity to point out that Apple does work
> with us and Acapela to ensure good compatibility of VoiceOver with the
> Infovox iVox voices (and visa versa) and foreign languages so Apple
> certainly cares about giving non-English users access to a good VO
> experience.

It just doesn't care about giving them the ability to independently  
install the operating system and manage their bios as it does with the  
rest of its user base.

But since you put it that way, all of us speak English pretty well.  I  
know for me this is quite inconsequential because English is my first  
language and I had the money to pay for Spanish voices for my academic  
work.  It just seemed like not that much to ask for since it's been  
something that is just offered with other solutions.  When I  
downloaded NVDA for my Mexican friend's computer, and started the  
installer, it automatically came up speaking in Spanish.  Linux gives  
similar support.  But of course they both use espeak which is not a  
high quality set of voices.  Quite honestly this thing about "high  
quality" has only come up since the days of Leopard and Alex.  I used  
to use Fred, which worked just fine before apple broke it, but truly,  
if it is a choice between having "low-quality" language support vs no  
language support whatsoever, I would have to go with the former.

Regards
Justin Harford

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