Post by besterp12 on May 7, 2009 22:13:30 GMT -5
I remember I had a soundblaster card that came with some program that would read any text files you fed it out loud. Other than that. I'm legally blind so I tried out a few screen readers in school starting with old versions of JAWS. I didn't really wind up needing it as magnification programs like ZoomText did the job for me.
Both programs are still around in some form BTW. They still sell JAWS and they sell all kinds of stuff for the visually impaired, even a PDA for the Deaf-Blind that translates conversations for them that's about as much of a PDA as the IBM Portable was Portable, but still some neat stuff. Some of it, a little overpriced, but it is a niche market.
You may want to briefly mention or provide links to the current synthetic voices like the AT&T natural Voices, or Acapela, or Loquendo. Searching for most of these will take you to pages with flash applets that let you preview what the voices sound like. They sound so much better now.
If you want to combine old and new, (or old and old if you stick with the old voices) there's even WinFrotz TTS. An interpreter for all of the old Infocom Text Adventure (Interactive Fiction) games that has built in calls to the windows TTS services. Letting you play IF games without even a having the screen on if you wanted to.
The original makers of JAWS:
www.freedomscientific.com/
and of course:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_(screen_reader)
Demos of new voices can be found here:
www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
www.loquendo.com/en/demos/interactive_tts_demo.htm
www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html
www.nuance.com/realspeak/
Google "nextup" if you want to buy any of them. Loquendo is only sold to companies though.
Winfrotz TTS can be found here:
www.binaryrevelations.com/iftts/
Both programs are still around in some form BTW. They still sell JAWS and they sell all kinds of stuff for the visually impaired, even a PDA for the Deaf-Blind that translates conversations for them that's about as much of a PDA as the IBM Portable was Portable, but still some neat stuff. Some of it, a little overpriced, but it is a niche market.
You may want to briefly mention or provide links to the current synthetic voices like the AT&T natural Voices, or Acapela, or Loquendo. Searching for most of these will take you to pages with flash applets that let you preview what the voices sound like. They sound so much better now.
If you want to combine old and new, (or old and old if you stick with the old voices) there's even WinFrotz TTS. An interpreter for all of the old Infocom Text Adventure (Interactive Fiction) games that has built in calls to the windows TTS services. Letting you play IF games without even a having the screen on if you wanted to.
The original makers of JAWS:
www.freedomscientific.com/
and of course:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_(screen_reader)
Demos of new voices can be found here:
www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
www.loquendo.com/en/demos/interactive_tts_demo.htm
www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html
www.nuance.com/realspeak/
Google "nextup" if you want to buy any of them. Loquendo is only sold to companies though.
Winfrotz TTS can be found here:
www.binaryrevelations.com/iftts/