- From: Raman T. V. <raman@mv.us.adobe.com>
- Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 13:28:02 -0800
- To: lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
- Cc: JuanJo.Miguez@esat.kuleuven.ac.be (JuanJo Miguez), www-style@w3.org, raman@mv.us.adobe.com
lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk writes:
> JuanJo Miguez writes:
>
> > [...] very interesting to include Speech in the CSS but we don't want
> > questionable..... If you have "prosidy:off" the result will be
> > like the voice of a robot
>
> This seems to use up one extra property just to give an additional voice type.
> It could equally well be expressed as a single extra value on the proposed
> voice-type property "robot".
>
> > (blind people prefer this kind of voice
>
> Indeed. I will leave it to any blind subscribers to the group to confirm
> or refute this assertion.
The assertion that "blind people like robot like voices" is completely bogus
(and for the record I'm blind)
In general, when I use speech to provide feedback as I program in C, I have
the synthesizer pronounce all punctuations and in the lower end devices this
also necessitates turning off intonation and prosodics --after all trying to
parse a fragment of C code as well punctuated literary prose and
speaking it is not particularly useful! But this is not to say that "blind
users like robot-like voices"
(Higher quality speech boxes preserve some intonation and dont sound as
robotic even when you force them to speak punctuations)
It's true that blind users who are forced to use low-end output devices and
programs that are not too intelligent about preprocessing the text before
speaking it have out of necessity learnt to live with these artifacts.
--
Best Regards,
____________________________________________________________________________
--raman
Adobe Systems Tel: 1 (415) 962 3945 (B-1 115)
Advanced Technology Group Fax: 1 (415) 962 6063
1585 Charleston Road Email: raman@adobe.com
Mountain View, CA 94039 -7900 raman@cs.cornell.edu
http://www-atg/People/Raman.html (Internal To Adobe)
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/raman.html (Cornell)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken
as representative of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc.
____________________________________________________________________________
Received on Wednesday, 28 February 1996 16:28:23 UTC