Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!yale!bunker!hcap!hnews!129!89.0!William.Wilson
From: William.Wilson@p0.f89.n129.z1.fidonet.org (William Wilson)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Synthesizer interfacing
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Date: 20 Sep 90 16:01:36 GMT
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[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]

 JS> to do it is by using calls to the DOS and BIOS interrupts 
 JS> rather than using direct screen writes.  Mind you, you don't 
 JS> want the synth to say EVERYTHING (constant time updates would 
 JS> be annoying, for instance); that's where programmers have to be 
 JS> insightful, clever, and intuitive.  I am rarely any of those, 
 JS> but I am, ocassionally, lucky. 

Jan,
     Ok, you've now heard from Eric Bohlman, a person who is pretty much
our technical guru around here, and who has written utilities for us
speech synthesizer users and is working on a quite innovative speech
program right now, and Jeff Salzberg, who is obviously being humble here
as he describes what he did in writing the two utilities he has.  Now,
let me give you the basic user perspective.
     First of all, I think we're talking about two things here.  You
originally said that you'd like to make your programs in general speech
compatible, and Jeff has given you the thing in a basic nutshell.  It
is, however, important to recognize that it is not only things like
clocks that you don't want spoken constantly with a bios write to the
screen, but even things like light bar menus and the such can be a pain
if all items are repeated every time they come up.  For example, in a
previous message I suggest to Hector Santos that were he to make the
Xpress reader program a bios writer in full it would be too noisy, and
for sure, a lot of programs fall under this category!  I find that as a
person gets more and more experienced with their speech program the
applications that write through the bios tend to appear noisier and
noisier, and for sure, this has been the case for me.  There are certain
kinds of output from programs that just has to be written through the
bios, and thus automatically spoken by any speech program, such as the
text being displayed from a file reader such as Jeff's SQWINT, but a
hard-fast rule of making a program a bios writer benefiting the speech
synthesizer user just can't be made.
     It's sort of one of those things you have to see to fully
understand, if you know what I mean!
     Also, I think your husband spoke of writing a speech program,
meaning a screen review program I suppose, and Eric suggested you look
at some of the demos available here.  I too think this would be a wise
idea, as I told you when we spoke, because frankly, I think the authors
of these things that participate here are downplaying what is involved
quite a bit, again I suppose as some act of humility!  Trust me Parkers,
we ain't talking just some simple device that does some sort of phonetic
translation and sends out to a com or parallel port!  Just take a look
at the documentation that comes with Doug Geoffray's Vocal-Eyes, or how
Eric is dealing with the speaking of windows in his Tinytalk, and I
think you'll understand what I'm trying to say.  I'm not trying to
discourage you in your desire to write a speech program, quite the
contrary, but I think it is pretty safe to say that not only is your
competition going to be tough, they are devoting countless hours into
their programs, and hey, there's still people like me out here bitching
about things we'd like to see done differently!
     The one thing you may wish to consider beyond the downloading of a
few demos from here is to attend a Visually Impaired Pittsburgh Area
Computer Enthusiast's meeting and seeing this stuff in action.  There
just happens to be a meeting this friday night at the University of
Pittsburgh's student union, and our own Jerry Berrier is going to do a
demo of Q&A.  He will most likely be using a speech program called
Softvert, but it will give you at least a taste of what any speech
program needs to do to be used by a blink.  As I said, I'm no
programmer, but one thing I can tell you is that the speech programmers
that are out there are no slouches, and unfortunately, I think their
rewards are far from numerous, at least in a commercial sense.

     I guess what was supposed to be an informational message to you and
your husband, Jan, became a "stroke your local BlinkAware programmer
message, but sincerely, when I sit back and think about it, I am
sincerely most appreciative of what these people have given me!  Were it
not for the work of people like Doug, Eric and Jeff, I'd probably still
be spending my nights in some sleezy bar downing beer after beer instead
of sitting at the keyboard posting messages!

Hmmm, before anybody else says it, that doesn't sound like too bad of an
idea to me either!
                                                        Willie
     

... BlinkTalk, Dr. Deb and Silver in Pittsburgh!

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