Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech

[Tony Baechler <tony baechler net>]

Sorry if this is a duplicate post.

I've purposely avoided this discussion because I don't want to get into the
open source versus proprietary software wars, but apparently my opinion
seems to differ from the norm, so here it is for what it's worth.

On 5/17/2015 4:05 PM, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> Its worth noting that NVDA out of the box uses an espeak variant, and I myself don't find that particular 
> variant palletable at all. I disable all espeak variants on all systems where I use espeak, as the default 
> voice is more acceptable to my ears.
>
> I wonder whether people would think differently of espeak if no variant was used by default with NVDA.

I have used lots of speech synthesizers over the many years I've been using
computers, going back to the Echo on the Apple II.  I've also used the
Doubletalk LT, the DECtalk Express, DECtalk Access32 (not on Linux), ESpeak,
Eloquence and who knows what others I'm forgetting.  I must say that the
only one of those I can stand to listen to for many hours at a time is the
DECtalk Express.  I have yet to find any software speech that I like.  I
find the software DECtalk to be muffled and hard to understand.  I can
tolerate ESpeak in short bursts, but it gives me a headache.  I should say
here that I've used ESpeak primarily in Linux and was not aware that NVDA
ships a variant.  I like MBrola and could get used to it, but it isn't very
responsive.  Festival is OK but not great and even more sluggish.  If I must
use software speech, I use Eloquence for telephones.  Apparently there are
two versions, normal and telephone with the difference being that telephone
has better support for higher frequencies.  I don't think that variant is
available except on Windows.

Call it loyalty, being stubborn or whatever you want, but I'm still using
the 2.6.32 kernel because it was the last one with Speakup support for
hardware speech.  I would really like to switch to Orca for daily tasks, but
I'm still in Windows because Orca apparently doesn't have serial support.
Similarly, I would like to switch to NVDA as my main screen reader in
Windows, but it definitely has no serial synthesizer support.  That's really
weird because it supports serial Braille displays and it looks like it
wouldn't be hard to write a serial DECtalk driver.  I am not a Python
programmer though and I wouldn't have any idea what I'm doing.  Even among
hardware synths, I have yet to find anything with the voice quality and
clarity of the DECtalk Express.  Note that versions of the firmware after
4.2CD are rubbish and not recommended.  I like the Audapter, but they are no
longer being manufactured.  I can't stand the Accent line.  The Echo was OK
as far as the sound of the voice, but very robotic.

To close, if there is a way to use my serial synth with NVDA and Orca, I
would like to know about it.  I would be happy to test any drivers if anyone
wants to write one.  I have a slight hearing loss, so perhaps that's my
problem, but I generally have a hard time understanding most software speech.