Hi, Ken and all. You braught up some good points. I find Eloquence, Dectalk, etc fine for doing day to day tasks, but put it in something like STFC, and it would ruin the environment I attempted to build. What I did is used Kate, and then edited her voice to sound something like the Enterprise computer, or as close as I could get. The voice is far superior to anything I could get on a screen reader even if I used Kate without the editing. I've demoed STFC before sighted people, and they can not believe the quality of the voice sinthesis used for that game. Another game, Troopenum, used actual human speech for self-voicing. Justin and Dan did an outstanding job on that game, and the self-voicing is top notch. Besides the possability of superior speech I eventually want to break in to other operating systems with my games. Mono for example allows porting of C# .net applications from one platform to another. I can concievably write a new input and audio backend for the games and port to FreeBSD, Mac, Linux, etc.. Java is another highly portable language although it's multimedia features leave much to be desired. The fact is if I build in self-voicing in to the games it won't matter on if the person has Jaws, gnopernicus, Window Eyes, Orca, etc. It will be universally accessible everywhere. Even as I write this I am currently downloading FreeBSD 6.1 because I have heard it has some accessibility improvements over Linux distributions that are out there. If so I may switch from Linux to FreeBSD for my open source Unix-like operating system, and I would like my projects to be as cross platform and portable as possible to and from Windows, and to and from Linux. In todays technology front free operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux haven't touched much of the blind market yet, but as the cost of living goes up, price of Windows software is harder to keep up, someday down the road I can see more blind computer users looking for lower cost alternatives such as Linux or FreeBSD.
Ken the Crazy wrote: > First off, if I sound a bit tactless, please forgive me as I have been > severely sick for a few days now, but I feel I need to make some points on > the issue of which is better, self-voicing games, or games that use screen > readers. > I'm so tired of screen reader based games. We're already bound to screen > readers for everything else as it is, so why should we have to have crappy > voice synthesizers in our games too? It's like saying, "okay kiddies, how > do you want your yummy carrots today--raw, chopped, sliced and diced, deep > fried, pickled, boiled, or have you thought of a nice new way to cook them?" > Any way you make 'em, they're still carrots, and any time you make games > with voice synthesizers you have that metallic element added. In Tank > Commander, the AT&T synths were not used often, and it was like a computer > was guiding you, and that fit perfectly with what the game is like. David > did the other voices himself. > Voice synthesis technology is a very important facet of life as a blind > person, but I am beginning to gag on the taste of them as it were. If you > can find a truly remarkable synthesizer, one you would actually want to use > in a game, be sure that most computers would be too slow to have that synch > and Jaws working together. It's funny, but the other day I heard some > sighted people complaining about voice synths. They didn't even know it was > a voice synth, someone just came up and said, "what's wrong with that > lady--she sounds messed up on something." > "No," I replied, "that's a voice synthesizer." > > Now Kate and Paul, the voices from Neospeech, far outrank Natural Voices and > other other synth company's voices to date, but I'd rather you use SAPI to > make them work than to have JAWS read them. For one thing, most of us only > have the 40 minute demo. For another, some don't have jaws. They have > window eyes or Hal, so why tailor make a game for one or two synth programs > when SAPI can do it all? As far as reviewing information, the use of the > function keys works very well, as in Jim Kitchen's text to Speech hangman. > If such keys were made standard from one game to another, and from one > company to another, you'd learn each game very rapidly, as you would already > know the special hot keys You wouldn't have to adjust the voice, because > you'd already have it set up in speech under the control panel in XP > and--well, I can't remember about how to do that in other windows operating > systems, but how hard would it be to set up a speech file that all > SAPI-compliant games could instantly read from and adjust?Having said all > that, I'll add one more thing. Voice actors are essential. I hope to get > into it again when I massothereapy classes are finished. > > > _______________________________________________ > Gamers mailing list .. Gamers@audyssey.org > To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit > http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make > any subscription changes via the web. > > > _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. Gamers@audyssey.org To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
