[orca-list] Dyslexics orca

[Anna Morris <say hello to anna googlemail com>]

Hi, I am dyslexic and have forced my uni to allow me to spend my software grant on a ubuntu/linux specialist machine, on the condition that orca will provide me with the text to speech I need (the reason for my grant). I have my new computer, but really stuggle to get orca to do what I want it to do. I was a mac user before, I used to just press control r when in my document and it would read what I was looking at in the nice viavox voice i had. I have set it to respond to ctrl rr disable speech and ctrl r to read entire document, but it keeps putting REALLY long pauses at the end of the sentence, if I tell  it to read by sentence, or at the end of the line, if I say read by line. The guy who made my computer for me has manages to get rab diphone as the voice, but its still not great. Would dearly love to access one of the really high quality voices from festival but he said it was the best he could get. Is there anyone who could give me some intensive help with this? I would like to write a brief manual for people in the same position as me, to explain how to set orca up for the standard dyslexics requirements as opposed to the visually impaired; for example I want to it read only documents, not the names of windows and menus etc.

best

Anna
Manchester, England