Hi Mateusz,
> Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy > as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on > a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" > written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. > PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, > DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these > names mean anything to me. A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character. DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text. There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
