text to speech (was Re: [school-discuss] idea)

[LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx>]

How well do programs like espeak and flite work when trying to offer
non-web based (local to a computer) text to speech options?  Are there
better Open Source options out there?

For a web site, the easiest way I can think of to add some text to
speech support is to take written material, record someone saying it
and offer links to download the files.  If you have PDF documents, why
not also suppy flac or ogg vorbis files of someone reading what's in
the documents?  If there's a tutorial on the page, offer a recording
of the information or even an audiovisual representation.  Maybe
something like what librivox does for books would make sense for this
situation?  Personally, what I'd like to see more web sites do is give
users a fast minimal representation of the important information so a
web site loads quickly and then if the user wants more multimedia
based information or more details, let the user choose those other
options.  Most web sites try to throw the most impressive (and slow
loading) multimedia at the user first and don't worry about issues
like content or navigation enough.

Can't think of other good ways to do this as a web based solution.
Maybe someone else can?  If you rely on the browser to do the
translation, the user needs to be able to download and use a specific
browser that offers that feature.  There were ways to automate running
audio in the background when you reach a web site, but they didn't
necessarily work across browsers.  There's a new tag in HTML5 that
will handle audio such as ogg vorbis (
http://html5doctor.com/html5-audio-the-state-of-play/ ), but it will
only work on browsers that fully support HTML 5.  Also, it was
considered bad web design to just have a midi go off and start playing
when you reach a new page, so I can't see where having an audio file
automatically playing would be any better.  Most users prefer the
choice of whether to play the file or not.  It can also considerably
slow load times of a page depending on how it's done.  If one leaves
the decision to the user as to whether to play and audio file or not,
that still leaves two options, download the file (which is always a
great fallback option too) or provide an interface to play through the
web page.  Again, if you're relying on the browser to play audioe via
a web interface, it's difficult to come up with a cross-platform
solution that works on all browsers.  You may be able to cover some of
them and to add options to increase the number of browsers supported,
but some browsers (and certain Open Source ones come to mind) just
won't support sound features.

There is also some support in CSS for audio (
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/aural.html ).  However, I've yet to see any
web sites I check regularly use it.  Would be curious if anyone else
has seen it in use.

So, are there other options out there for text to speech support, web
or otherwise?

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/recipes/music.htm

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 4:07 PM,  <marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Have you included text-to-speech?  That is so important for 30%+ of our
> students . . . those who do not read-to-learn.  Hope so.
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