- From: Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net>
- Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2000 00:17:01 -0400
- To: Harvey Bingham <hbingham@ACM.org>
- Cc: User Agent Guidelines Emailing List <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>
aloha, harvey! in response to my minuted comments: quote GR: Frequently, there are about 6 different voices used for orientation. unquote you asked, quote Gregory, I'd like that list of uses included, in the note, as recognizably useful distinctions that voice characteristics can provide. unquote as a general rule, screen-readers allow users to set distinct vocal characteristics -- which are roughly akin to the "Appearance" property sheet of the "Display Properties" available to users via the Control Panel in the Windows environment -- as an orientational mechanism, that is capable of instantly communicating to the user the context in which he or she is working and/or the source of the synthesized speech being spouted at him or her...: one of the main uses of these differentiation mechanisms is to distinguish whether the application cursor or the speech cursor is active... the speech cursor provides a gross navigational mechanism that not only allows the user to grope about available screen space in order to reconnoiter the application window, but which usually also serves to move the pointing device's point-of-regard, which is often necessary to activate or deactivate an object or discrete area of the screen in the absence of a keyboard equivalent, or when the sub-window fails to receive focus, isn't keyboard focusable, or is a custom control which neither the application nor the screen reader recognize as a control, but simply as a graphic... each "voice mode" contains a range of vocal characteristics (including, but not limited to, volume, rate, person, pitch and punctuation verbosity, which can be usually further sub-divided into "All", "Most", "Some", or "None"), in order to provide as broad a range of individual tailoring as possible -- some users, for example, prefer to only switch genders as an orientation mechanism, some switch only the "cutely named" synthesized voice, some solely the pitch or rate, but most use a combination of the configuration options available to them, so as to provide as instantaneous an orientational mechanism as possible... the 6 most voice modes are: Global Keyboard (i.e. keyboard input echo vocal characteristics) Application Cursor Speech Cursor Messages Prompts note that some screen-readers treat "Messages" (such as announcing "Page 5 of 15" when one moves across a page boundary in a word processor) and "Prompt" (labels attached to controls) as a single entity, while others offer a wider range of flexibility... during the teleconference, i mentioned another vocal characteristic, Uppercase Indication, which, while (usually) not a discrete voice mode, is a voice characteristic which is often grouped with the voice modes listed above.... some synthesizers offer only incremental control over pitch, others issue earcons (usually in the form of a tone for a capital letter or a double tone to indicate all caps), or say "cap" or "all caps", or some combination of the 3... note: the information contained in this emessage is generalized from my personal and professional experience with screen readers, primarily in the Windows and DOS environments, although i did double-check my facts using the 4 Windows and 5 DOS-based screen readers which i have loaded on my laptop... i have also been fortunate enough to use both emacspeak in real-life situations and to play around a bit with outSpoken on a mac... while the outSpoken approach is similar to that employed by Windows-based screen readers, both emacspeak and aster employ spatial effects as orientational vocal characteristics, whereas most other speech synthesizers which do support spatial effects do so mostly for novelty's sake (one offering a female voice "in a hall", "in space" and "in an auditorium")... gregory ------------------------------------------------------------------- ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution. -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net> Camera Obscura <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/index.html> VICUG NYC <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/> Read 'Em & Speak <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/books/> -------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Sunday, 18 June 2000 00:30:41 UTC