Hi Robert. I agree with you and I am blind, so I'm glad you finally said it. I listen to text to speech at about 430 words per minute. That is slower than some people. I think it is great that PG has made some audio books available. However, to be blunt about it, I find them awful to listen to. They have low volume so are hard to hear and are very, very slow. I can't stand speech that slow! I know that the sighted public don't do well with computer speech, so I suppose it's necessary for them, but I would much rather have the speed set to at least 300 words per minute at the slowest. I wouldn't necessarily agree with you about raw wave files. I think mp3 is fine. One very big Internet radio station for the blind is ACB Radio. They are online at: http://www.acbradio.org/ They use mp3 exclusively, and at a rather low bitrate. I have no problem listening to it. In general, I don't like mp3. I collect old time radio and refuse to accept anything but raw wave files, but that is because it is of historical value and should be saved in the best audio condition possible. At 08:40 AM 4/4/2005 -0500, you wrote:
I can offer little commentary about Braille, but as far as audio formats are concerned, I can say that the visually impaired persons I have known who listen to substantial amounts of text often listen to it at substantially faster-than-intended speeds, and some do some other transformations on the audio to help them better catch meaning at these high speeds. Such things seem to be idiosyncratic to the individual listener.
A fairly 'raw' format, such as .wav, would I think be useful to such users, but lossy compression formats have been engineered around assumptions about listening conditions that simply aren't true for the practices of those who listen to recorded speech as a way of life, and may be of little practical value.