Eloquence is great because it is so familiar due to its popularity on a wide variety of screen readers and other assistive technology products. But realistically, it has not been in development since, I believe, the late 1990s. For some perspective on that, the first public version of Mac OS X was released in 2000. In my opinion, that age (of Eloquence) is starting to show. Specifically, I notice that Eloquence sounds quite stuttery on certain sound cards, like in VMWare virtual machines, where Vocalizer voices work fine. As well, I am sure many of you remember the fact that it crashes when certain strings are encountered. Screen reader developers have more or less worked around this issue, I assume with built-in dictionary rules, but I don’t know what the merits of investing in Eloquence would be in this day and age. I recall that NV Access invested considerable energy in working out a licensing deal to provide an option for their users to buy Eloquence, but they encountered considerable barriers that ultimately halted the project. These barriers included eventually being told that sales of the synthesizer had ceased.
All this is to say that I doubt we’ll see Eloquence in Mac OS X any time soon, but that is just my opinion. This message was written more or less from memory, so feel free to correct any errors of fact. Grant -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
