re: [gutvol-d] what a difference a day makes
melissa said:
And how well DOES your software work for the end user, if he is a blind person who gets crap instead of content when his screenreader is processing your files?
first, you don't have to be blind to have use for text-to-speech. lots of people love audio-books... anyone who has a problem with text-to-speech in the .html file i uploaded should let me know... i would certainly recommend instead the .zml file itself for text-to-speech, since it is the-text-and-only-the-text. it's also worth noting that my "viewer" program has text-to-speech capability. so melissa, you can try it out yourself, and let me know how it works for you. it works just fine for me... my program can also create an audio-file, if you wanna send that to another player. (at least it can on the mac side, i haven't got that working yet for the windows side.) but i only support .aiff files at the moment, and those things are just _huge_. oh well, i guess disk-space is cheap these days... thanks for asking, melissa... -bowerbird p.s. for those people who do not have tools that handle files with non-native line-endings, i've uploaded a copy of alice.zml for the p.c.
http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01pc.zml and one with linefeed end-of-lines for linux: http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01ll.zml
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 04:31 PM 9/21/2005, you wrote:
it's also worth noting that my "viewer" program has text-to-speech capability. so melissa, you can try it out yourself, and let me know how it works for you. it works just fine for me...
Sorry, but dropping in a couple hooks to a text to speech engine doesn't make a program accessible. Aaron Cannon - -- E-mail: cannona@fireantproductions.com Skype: cannona MSN Messenger: cannona@hotmail.com (Do not send E-mail to the hotmail address.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) - GPGrelay v0.959 Comment: Key available from all major key servers. iD8DBQFDMfkHI7J99hVZuJcRAkajAJ9Xdv6a5SubbDIEHw5Hx1CsLFf0MgCg1W9R sx/6vv9I4ooapfiLgZkfuEY= =3i6L -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Uh-uh. My girlfriend is wheelchair-bound and she uses audiobooks a lot because she can't use her hands at all. The program she uses to listen to standard bound books is very expensive and does a lot of work to make a book work for her. It has to remove a lot of page breaks, line breaks, and other garbage, and it's got to do that without input from her at all. Simply dropping a book into a text to speech program does not an audiobook make, and Cassandra would tell you that, she's no dummy. Jared Aaron Cannon wrote on 9/21/2005, 5:21 PM:
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At 04:31 PM 9/21/2005, you wrote:
it's also worth noting that my "viewer" program has text-to-speech capability. so melissa, you can try it out yourself, and let me know how it works for you. it works just fine for me...
Sorry, but dropping in a couple hooks to a text to speech engine doesn't make a program accessible.
Aaron Cannon
- -- E-mail: cannona@fireantproductions.com Skype: cannona MSN Messenger: cannona@hotmail.com (Do not send E-mail to the hotmail address.)
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iD8DBQFDMfkHI7J99hVZuJcRAkajAJ9Xdv6a5SubbDIEHw5Hx1CsLFf0MgCg1W9R sx/6vv9I4ooapfiLgZkfuEY= =3i6L -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d
Aaron Cannon wrote:
Bowerbird wrote:
it's also worth noting that my "viewer" program has text-to-speech capability. so melissa, you can try it out yourself, and let me know how it works for you. it works just fine for me...
Sorry, but dropping in a couple hooks to a text to speech engine doesn't make a program accessible.
This is true. Text-to-speech (TTS) engines require more than just raw text, as Jared Buck mentioned in a separate reply. TTS prefers understandable document structure, so it can deliver the text in a way that listeners[*] will readily understand. For example, higher-end TTS engines want to know what is a section header, what is a paragraph, and other kinds of structural info. That way the TTS can communicate to the listener, using conventions suitable for the audio realm, the structure of the document. (In the visual realm we use agreed-to conventions based on typographic layout to communicate important document structures -- most people learn the visual cues of document structure without explicitly knowing they are "conventions".) Now Bowerbird's ZML format does provide machine readable structure, at least at the paragraph and header level, and that is commendable -- he just needs to build the interface to the TTS engine which will translate the ZML structure to something the TTS will understand (like "this is a level 2 header to this section".) <smile/> But just dump any raw, unnormalized text into TTS, and it is delivered to the listener in an essentially unstructured way. Even if the TTS engine is programmed to be somewhat intelligent at trying to unravel text document structure, it will oftentimes get it wrong. Yuck. Just spend time with some accessibility advocates at a meeting (I met with George Kerscher and Janina Sajka at a meeting once, and spent a lot of time with George and his guide dog "Nesbit" another time), and one gains a greater appreciation for the needs and requirements for accessibility of texts, and how that affects document formatting issues. Jon [* Listeners not only need to be vision-impaired. There are many uses where sighted people will listen to texts, such as when they are driving or fixing equipment.] [For a cool news item about George Kerscher and his guide dog "Nesbit", see: http://www.guidedogs.com/news-Grads%20F01.html ]
participants (4)
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Aaron Cannon -
Bowerbird＠aol.com -
Jared Buck -
Jon Noring