On 07/17/2014 08:13 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
I haven't experimented much with openSUSE / Okular yet, but it has by far the worst actual voice of the 3.
It is amazing to me that Mac and Adobe have got great voices speaking, but don't have decent user interfaces to manage the narrator. :(
I've been gradually losing vision for 8 or more years and so I am in a similar situation, I still have a substantial amount of vision, can use the keyboard mouse and can read large text. I've tried IOS 5 (ipod touch), xp, vista, w7 and a little bit of android 4. So far I found KDE to have the greatest functionality in the TTS that is built into the operating system. Yes, the voice quality needs much improvement, but it is perfectly understandable and can be adjusted in terms of speed and pitch. Jovie has very good integration with okular, much better for my use than acrobat. It has a selection tool that can select a box, not just running text. This is extremely useful in reading locums and tables - which are often interspersed into pdf medical articles. I have not tried the latest versions of acrobat for win, but a bit over a year ago it had no such feature. Jovie can pause and resume reading in the middle of a pdf. It takes a bit of experimentation to figure out that you have to stop the document and then resume (rather than pause then resume), and it re-starts at the beginning of the current paragraph, not after the last read word. Jovie is steadily improving and has a simple functional interface (and when well integrated - as in okular - does not need mouse clicking on the system tray). I am using KDE 4.10.5, so I am keen to try later versions to see if the previous steady improvements to jovie have continued. The simple task of highlighting text (in a web page, document or dialog) and then having the system read it out is lacking in all windows versions. There is a built in TTS application called Narrator, but it will not do this simple task. I finally confirmed that by extensive reading. One has to install a third party application and MS recommends buying third party software. There are plenty of freeware versions, but I have not tried any. But after a fair amount of labor I came to the conclusion that this simple feature is intentionally missing in win versions. What I have is a valid copy of xp running in virtualbox. Since VB has a bidirectional clipboard, I can copy things in the xp guest and have Jovie read it out with a simple mouse click. I am going to explore Android further. I am disappointed hearing that the TTS application may expose private info, but IOS is virtually impossible to integrate with linux (I've tried for years). Gustav -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org