@Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 My first attempt at verry small TTS related contribution was almost 15 years ago. At that time Jonathan Duddington, the original eSpeak author created a slovak voice for eSpeak as a reply to my request. At that time I have tried to contributed some dictionary rules so slovak voice for eSpeak started to be usefull. That made me happy and for years I was just using eSpeak on all my devices. Then sometime at the end of 2022 I have found out group of talented people have created great polish voices for the RHVoice TTS. I was wondering how talented polish guys were able to accomplish that and I have started looking around, asked a lot of friends and I was still unable to get something usefull done. Sometime in early 2023 I got in contact with @Zvonimir Stanecic who started working on czech voice for RHVoice. Under his stewardship I was able to learn how to train RHVoice and how to write language rules for RHVoice. My friend ondro shared our vision of better sounding slovak voice and thanks to his talent as a sound engineer as well as a radio speaker here in slovakia he managed to prepare really very high quality audio recordings we are now using in all these experiments. It took us some three or four weeks of very intensive daily work during april and may of 2023 to prepare a first beta version of the slovak voice. When it became evident we haven't wasted our times and our prototype voice started sounding usefull, more close friends have joined us by providing their feetback. Sometime in july 2023 again with @Zvonimir Stanecic leading the team we were able to release first slovak male voice for #RHVoice. In 2024 two more friends have joined the team, managed to record enough high quality audio recordings to train a female voice. So now we do have two slovak voices for RHVoice. During 2024 except of training the female voice we were slowly being improving graphemes to phonemes translation improving the slovak language support for RHVoice. At that time we have realized there are other even better sounding TTS engines out there and wanted to use our recordings for training those. And now the circle is closing we have found out we need to improve eSpeak phonemizer with the experience we have earned during improving RHVoice slovak language support. It took us some 6 months of interupted work to port new RHVoice specific language support back to eSpeak. We even haven't managed to made these available to public yet. We are now experimenting training piper and trying to improve RHVoice even further.
So while I can't really understand and speak other languages, I might be able to try answering some of your questions either alone or in cooperation with other guys helping within this team and if you are passionate enough I think it's very likelly you will be able to achieve great result.
Again let me repeat @Zvonimir Stanecic is the number one language expert leading teams working on czech, hungarian, croatian, serbian, slovak and other languages support for RHVoice. I think @Cleverson you might find this story of mine and my friends inspiring too.

Nice article in czech describing latest advancemend in developing czech and slovak voices for #RHVoice portal-pelion.cz/rodina-zdarma…

@WestphalDenn @Talon I don't think it's that catastrophic as this sounds any more. I can't say this is not happening but it's very rare. I am on @GNOME . If I get an unresponsive experience I can press alt+F2, type in orca --replace and the screen reader comes back. I can even bind this to a global keyboard shortcut.
When I am leaving my office I am often closing some 15 browser windows, some 10 terminal windows, about 5 different files open in the text editor.
Most used apps on my desktop include #Firefox #Thunderbird file manager (pcmanfm or nautilus), Gedit, VLC media player, electron based apps such as teamsforlinux, losslesscut and gnome-terminal.
Next I'm using @LibreOffice, I am also using #Emacs with #speechd-el a little and finally some other less frequently used apps.
As for the #TTS or the #audio setup I am using #RHVoice, speech-dispatcher and @PipeWire Project .
Finally with @Matt Campbell and @Lukáš Tyrychtr we do have tallented visually disabled developers dogfooding or partially dog fooding so let me finish this post by saying it really is gold era of a linux #a11y and we are looking forward for what it brings us in the future.

Dnes si dovolím odkázať na veľmi vydarený český hlas pre hlasový výstup #TTS #RHVoice. Sám autor o tom píše tu: groups.io/g/Blind-android/mess… . O použití pre #Windows #Linux a #Android sa dočítate aj na jednoduchej komunitnej stránke hlas.ondrosik.sk/ . Gro používateľov sú ťažko zrakovo postihnutí používatelia, ktorí si bez kvalitného hlasového výstupu a čítača obrazovky nedokážu svoj digitálny život predstaviť, možno ale aj vám by sa mohol hodiť takýto hlas pre váš počítač či smartfón nezávislí od obrovských korporácií. Mohli by ste ho napr. použiť na čítanie kníh alebo počas navigácii cez GPS.

@modulux @:garfield:‍fuchsiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa When testing web #a11y it's good to know that screen readers do often implement their own navigation paradigm as an addition to standard focus navigation and browser's caret navigation features. It's called browse mode. With orca on linux, you can press orca+a to toggle the browse mode vs focus mode when focus is inside a google chrome / chromium or mozilla firefox web content.
As for the TTS engines there is #RHVoice with some very good voices such as english voice named slt.

Just dropped on the App Store: #RHVoice for #iOS. For now only #Macedonian and #Albanian languages are supported but it's worth bookmarking/installing this now to follow updates. Again, new linguistic communities have been included to the #Apple ecosystem with high-quality, free-of-charge voices. apps.apple.com/pl/app/rhvoice/… #Accessibility #Blind #SpeechSynthesis #TextToSpeech #Languages

Here is the walk through on creating new voice for #RHVoice github.com/RHVoice/RHVoice/wik…
If you are adding new voice for existing language that might not be that difficult to do I guess.
However I my-self have difficulties configuring phoneme translation for slovak and I am just on the beginning with my ultimate goal on creating #slovak voice.