Thanks, I might give this a go for the short amount of time that I use Windows for haha.

Out of curiosity, do we have the source for the synth? I've always wanted a cross-platform solution preferably usable from Lua.

There is an old and wise saying that still goes round in circles: There's a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in 😀

I don't expect companies to reduce barriers, but hopefully we can. Fingers crossed anyway.

Ah, the bane of all blind gamers, platformers 😀

If you like poker just a tiny bit, you will be addicted to this. The runs are super fast, there's a ton of content to unlock (which you can just skip if you like), not to mention that the source can be tinkered with due to the nature of the engine and the dev being awesome for not compiling it into Lua bytecode, so technically you could convert it to a platformer for personal use, though no idea how that would work, maybe complete a platformer level to obtain a card instead of just buying it haha.

The Brailab DLL is not from Brailab CD, it's from the original hardware, just partially rewritten to compile and run on Windows. When I was working on translating NVDA and of course exposing Hungarian blind people to it, we made an agreement through a Hungarian organisation with the original developer to make it available for Hungarian NVDA users. We also needed some extra functionality for indexing, as well as playing wav files, which would have replaced the synth's spelling feature.

Implementing this was not quite feasible, but they did give us the source code, should we wish to do this ourselves. About a year later, Vocaliser became available and due to its more natural speech, Brailab was mostly forgotten. Some people who grew up using the hardware or later the CD variant still use the addon today. They have also developed an overlay for Android which uses Brailab as its synth.

I am legally bound by this agreement, so I am unfortunately unable to disclose the source code, sorry.

Ah, Multivox was the first Hungarian synth that everyone used with Jaws before it was translated, there was no eSpeak, only Brailab, WinTalker Voice and Multivox. Then Profivox came, which was licensed exclusively for Jaws, and the underrated SpeakBoard hich was sold even in supermarkets on CD, then Vocalizer, which is everywhere now.

It has loads of issues, Nuance clearly did not test it, nor listened when lots or developers (including myself) complained. They have added horrible pronunciation rules that cause common words to be mispronounced and there's only a partial fix. But I digress.

There was no manual that I know of, we just got a zip file with the source dump and a few lines on how to compile it. It had 7 various parameters to my knowledge: rate, volume, pitch, emphasis, spelling, weird mode (this just modified formants I believe), and another one I am unable to recall at the moment. Most of these were implemented in the NVDA addon, the useful ones anyway.

I might be able to find the source, so please let me know if you need me to look up anything.