[opensuse] OT - Text to speech, any platform
All, I have a friend that is slowly going blind. She can read for 15 or 20 minutes at a time currently, but then the headaches, etc. set in. She needs a way to read long PDFs in particular. She currently uses a Mac as her primary PC and she has an iPad I believe. Without spending thousands of dollars, what is the best "english" text to speech reader out there? Once I know the app I'll look into what platforms it is on. Note that at least for now she doesn't need it to handle reading the application controls, just the content of PDFs. She can navigate the controls well enough, it is sustained reading that is a problem. Thanks Greg -- Greg Freemyer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
Greg Freemyer wrote:
All,
I have a friend that is slowly going blind.
She can read for 15 or 20 minutes at a time currently, but then the headaches, etc. set in.
She needs a way to read long PDFs in particular. She currently uses a Mac as her primary PC and she has an iPad I believe.
Without spending thousands of dollars, what is the best "english" text to speech reader out there? Once I know the app I'll look into what platforms it is on.
Note that at least for now she doesn't need it to handle reading the application controls, just the content of PDFs. She can navigate the controls well enough, it is sustained reading that is a problem.
Thanks Greg -- Greg Freemyer
This looks pretty easy http://www.wikihow.com/Activate-Text-to-Speech-in-Mac-OSx -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-16 a las 13:07 -0400, Greg Freemyer escribió:
She needs a way to read long PDFs in particular. She currently uses a Mac as her primary PC and she has an iPad I believe.
I believe that acrobat has that functionality natively - but I have never used it. Maybe it needs Windows. Maybe it needs some support engine. Back around 1997, my audio card (soundplayer? No, soundblaster) did have software to read text quite decently, in Windows. In this time they must be much better. My TomTom car navigator reads text (streets and such) decently. It is a non-open engine, but it uses Linux. I thnk it is an Italian development, not sure, I don't remember the name. This one is multilingual, not only English. I may be able to find out. There is some support for text to speech in openSUSE. Dunno how good it is for sustained, long text read. I think not much. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPGtHkACgkQja8UbcUWM1w9hwD/YlIRtSuyF1+uDpz/7ypEKWp3 6VWkhOr26awE2+KKSjMA/22MWnXTRQNitjH1LUx1yunx1BB+aVb9y37LsJEb8k/W =DPNf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On 07/16/2014 07:20 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
El 2014-07-16 a las 13:07 -0400, Greg Freemyer escribió:
She needs a way to read long PDFs in particular. She currently uses a Mac as her primary PC and she has an iPad I believe.
I believe that acrobat has that functionality natively - but I have never used it. Maybe it needs Windows. Maybe it needs some support engine.
snip
There is some support for text to speech in openSUSE. Dunno how good it is for sustained, long text read. I think not much.
I don't know much about Apple products but I know iPhones and Ipod Touches with newer IOS versions have a fair amount of TTS support. One blind physician with whom I have worked says his iPhone is indispensable. Acrobat Reader has native TTS capability in windows. I found it cumbersome and very difficult to use. The same feature does not work in linux (last tried it a couple of years ago). KDE has jovie which is it's most mature TTS application. Once jovie is enabled, Okular will read pdf files very well and much better than acrobat reader. It will read selected sections, selected text, whole documents. It works great for me. jovie sits in the system tray and text selected in most applications can be read out by clicking the icon. It is well integrated with okular, konqueror and a few other applications I believe. I'm still struggling with the win7 TTS applications, so can't give much feedback. I have an android tablet, but I still have not figured out most of it. Gustav -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Gustav Degreef <gustav97@gmail.com> wrote:
On 07/16/2014 07:20 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
El 2014-07-16 a las 13:07 -0400, Greg Freemyer escribió:
She needs a way to read long PDFs in particular. She currently uses a Mac as her primary PC and she has an iPad I believe.
I believe that acrobat has that functionality natively - but I have never used it. Maybe it needs Windows. Maybe it needs some support engine.
snip
There is some support for text to speech in openSUSE. Dunno how good it is for sustained, long text read. I think not much.
I don't know much about Apple products but I know iPhones and Ipod Touches with newer IOS versions have a fair amount of TTS support. One blind physician with whom I have worked says his iPhone is indispensable.
Great. I will have to figure that out for my friend. She's not the most technical.
Acrobat Reader has native TTS capability in windows. I found it cumbersome and very difficult to use.
You may want to try a newer version of Reader. I was very impressed with my recent test, but I had it reading paragraphs. It can also do pages and the whole doc. Okay, I just tried another doc and it was totally unusable. So it seems that the structure of the PDF matters to a big degree.
The same feature does not work in linux (last tried it a couple of years ago).
I wondered about that.
KDE has jovie which is it's most mature TTS application. Once jovie is enabled, Okular will read pdf files very well and much better than acrobat reader. It will read selected sections, selected text, whole documents. It works great for me. jovie sits in the system tray and text selected in most applications can be read out by clicking the icon. It is well integrated with okular, konqueror and a few other applications I believe.
I'm finding that out as I experiment. I just found okular has a right click option for select to text to read it. Very nice.
I'm still struggling with the win7 TTS applications, so can't give much feedback. I have an android tablet, but I still have not figured out most of it. Gustav
Thanks for the feedback. I didn't realize there was so much "native" support for TTS.
From what I see at this point, Okular with it's select text - right click speak text feature is more flexible the Acroread. But for at least some PDFs the acrobat reader is smoother and easier to listen to if you have pages and pages of info to listen to.
Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
A day later, I'm shocked how bad the user interface is for the Mac Text To Speech stuff. - With the built-in accessibility feature on the Mac there is a really nice, easy to listen and understand voice. (I used Alex, but there are several to choose from.) If you want it to read 20 pages of PDF material, you highlight it (select it), then hit option-escape and the reading commences. So far so good, but lets say you've queued up 20 minutes of material. Then 10 minutes in the phone rings, or you need a bio break so you want to pause, then continue. The Mac doesn't over that ability. When you restart the speaking it starts over from the beginning so you have to listen to the first 10 minutes again. Or you have to use the mouse to move around and find the text and re-select what you know want to hear. They also have a "voice-over" feature that verbalizes where the mouse is pointing. It is way too verbose to be useful for someone that has anywhere close to usable vision. It does have a pause / continue feature, but the verbosity is beyond what can be lived with. Crazy Bad feature set - With Acrobat Reader on the MAC, it is similar to Windows in that how the read paragraph behaves varies greatly based on how the PDF is internally structured. But with Windows the read to end of document feature works (but it seems to always start at the start of doc). On the Mac I could not get that feature to work. Acrobat too would reset to the start of document when reading under Win 7, so effectively for Acrobat on both Windows and MacOS it requires continuous interaction with mouse and/or keyboard. 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. :( -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-16 a las 20:25 +0200, Gustav Degreef escribió:
I have an android tablet, but I still have not figured out most of it. Gustav
My android phone has text to speech, but when I try to activate it, I get a warning that, as far I understand, the conversion is not local, but done externally on google severs, so that there are privacy concerns, specially if the conversion includes sensitive materials such as passwords or bank data. So I refused to even test it. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPHga0ACgkQja8UbcUWM1yb0QD9ESX0NLWcs/bh764INMIjQVxU VOYrdiz/dwZT5ulOXhcA/RQ5Ov4y/iZacL0tsICXxjZty0vnae5dAH2mrD1F1nid =cvby -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 1:20 PM, Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
El 2014-07-16 a las 13:07 -0400, Greg Freemyer escribió:
She needs a way to read long PDFs in particular. She currently uses a Mac as her primary PC and she has an iPad I believe.
I believe that acrobat has that functionality natively - but I have never used it. Maybe it needs Windows. Maybe it needs some support engine.
Interesting. I just checked Okular in oS 13.1 If you install jovie (zypper in jovie) then Okular has a speak current page feature under Tools as well as speak whole document. It takes a bit to get used to, but it is very understandable. I think it would be hard for a long listening session. Also if you can't select paragraphs or similar sub-page blocks of text to read it doesn't seem very usable. I tried acrobat reader from Windows 7 and I prefer the voice. It defaults to reading one paragraph at a time, but has a read full page selection under view and a read document to the end selection. From a user control-ability perspective that is much better than Okular. The acrobat/win7 voice is also far superior to the Okular one. In fact, the Okular is similar to what a Kindle can do. The Acrobat voice is smooth and has intonation. I know acroread was available in opensuse before. I don't see it in OSS or non-OSS for 13.1. I tried a couple of the home hosted packages (home:frispete:acroread and home:Int-sysadmin:tools) but both only have the source package. Is acroread still available for 13.1? (Not that it matters that much. I will try to set my friend up under MacOS, so getting it working in oS is a nicety not a need.) Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
participants (4)
-
Carlos E. R. -
Greg Freemyer -
Gustav Degreef -
Tony Alfrey