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Kendell Clark is an open source advocate and Fedora user who has been using Gnu/Linux since August 2011. I love my wife melisa, my dog tigger, and gnu/linux, especially if has anything to do with accessibility
Kendell Clark is an open source advocate and Fedora user who has been using Gnu/Linux since August 2011. I love my wife melisa, my dog tigger, and gnu/linux, especially if has anything to do with accessibility
I'll be glad to help you. The default synthesizer orca uses is espeak, which can be a shock if you're used to more human sounding voices. If you've ever used a program called nonvisual desktop access, or nvda for short on windows, that's what it uses by default as well, although it has a voice in espeak that in my opinion is much better than the default. You have a couple of options. Linux does not have a lot of human sounding voices, so if that's what you want I'm sorry but you really don't have many options. But you have a couple of alternatives. If you want a more natural sounding voice, you can purchase a program called voxin, which is the old ibm viavoice that the jaws screen reader uses. It's an older version than the one used in windows and it's no longer maintained, but there are a lot of blind people out there that like it. If you're interested, you can buy it at http://voxin.oralux.net. It only costs five bucks, and you only need to buy it once. If you're willing to invest time and effort, you can improve espeak. What exactly is wrong with the voices? Are they just too harsh for your ears? Do you maybe speak a language other than english? If so, espeak is really one of your only options, at least in linux. Voxin can be bought in I believe six or seven languages, but if your language isn't on that list espeak is your best bet. We're always looking for native speakers of other languages to help us make espeak better. Other than espeak and voxin, there are commercial voices called cepstral, which can be bought, and installed, after which you can use them with orca. They're quite large, but if you want human sounding they're an option. If you're willing to make linux accessibility better I'd encourage you to join the orca mailing list, which is the main list for orca help. Also the espeak discussion list if you're interested in making espeak better. If you need any more help either comment here or send me an email and I'll help you as best I can.