Laura,
Thanks for all of the good information!
This is the best embedded text-to-speech feature I have seen . . . https://sample.stemscopes.com/scopes/203 This is a STEMscopes sample page. The voice quality is so good I thought it was audio at first. I believe it was written by their webmaster consultant dude. He also writes phone apps. Not open source though.
Librivox of couse is great. We also have a membership to Learning Ally (used to Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic). Costs about $100 a year for as many audio books as you want. They have not been user friendly at all over the years but at least now have Mac and phone apps.
I am very very interested in this Drupal feature if it would have text-to-speech. Or if Moodle has a text-to-speech addition that would be great too. I am thinking about home schooling my eleven year old and then posting all of the lessons I create that are dyslexia friendly to a website.
WriteType is a cool speaking word processor I like. I use it with espeak.
Thanks again - Marilyn
On 27.09.2012 06:55am, LM wrote:
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.### To unsubscribe from the schoolforge-discuss mailing list: Send an e-mail message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with no subject and a body of "unsubscribe schoolforge-discuss"