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My question is, is this better than a screen reader?

If you’re actually seriously asking, it’s better than a screen reader in such a way a video might be better than text I suppose. More personality and character and you have more control over what gets said how, and how it sounds. You’re basically narrating your toots like an audiobook. If you enjoy doing it, there’s nothing wrong with it, but those of us who use screen readers are so used to them that we’re happy reading the text as well. We usually set our screen readers up in very specific ways, like specific voice, the speech rate is really fast, substitutions and different levels of punctuation and so on, so we already have a very specific way in which we read posts which might take literal fractions of the time that listening to the audio might. But on the other hand, you reading your posts gives voice and sound to the text and I think that’s cool.

@talon
I have zero experience with screen readers. I can use my imagination and what I’m imagining is something akin to what Stephen Hawking’s “voice” sounds like. And I can imagine how awful a wall of emojis would be.
Glad you liked my AudioToot. It was fun to make.

This is what the post sounded like to me yesterday. Use different settings for different things, but this is how I usually read Fedi.

@talon
Wow.
That was my toot? I didn’t recognise a single word of that! That’s insane. That’s faster than I can read. Respect. It’s certainly more time efficient.

@talon Even though I am also a screenreader user, I couldn't understand that reading of the toot with Eloquence either, it was too fast for me: I use more human-sounding voices with my screen-reader, faster than ordinary human speech, but not as fast as that.

@talon’s recording does seem extreme, and I would think that there is a huge variation between users. My mind has been opened once again.

Yes, we're all different when it comes to screenreaders: different voices, different settings, different speeds and the rest.

Yeah I kind of understood Talon's voice, but not completely everything, because I'm super not used to it. Here's an example of what I use.