the only form of "accessibility with touchscreens" I've seen are either alternative menues & audio navigation (like on most modern ATMs in Germany) - bypassing touch entirely like a phone tree - or some #TTS reading where one swipes if not the entire screen.

I'd love to really dive into this...

Recommendations from your own personal experience, please!

I have a lot of DRM-free ePubs for which there is no audiobook.

I'd like to convert one or two of them into audiobooks.

I use Linux.

I don't have any high end machines, but I am happy to wait for a conversion process.

I want all conversion to be done locally, using FOSS.

I am content with a generic voice, else I could provide voice samples.

Have you done this and, if so, would you recommend what you did?

#Linux #audiobook #tts

Okay, so I just have to rant about something that I think is going to hold the Linux Desktop back a bit, especially for blind users. That is config files. Specifically, editing some file that's got no kind of linter, or checker, to make sure that whatever the user put in it works and doesn't leave one without speech.

So, this is specifically about the Speech dispatcher, which is a package in Linux a bit like Microsoft's SAPI. Of course, there's that new one, Spiel, that's being worked on, but I've not tried it yet. So, you can run spd-conf to set up a config file, but a lot of folks tell me that, in order to increase the default speech rate for stuff like games that use speech-dispatcher, web apps that speak through speech-dispatcher, self-voicing apps, I'd have to edit the config file.

Now, that's not awful for me, I can do it. But there really, really needs to be a GUI for it. And if you ask *me* why I don't make it myself, I'll tell you that if it's so easy, you should have made it with the snap of *your* tallented fingers, instead of spending all that time being a reply-guy. Windows has a speech properties dialog. Mac has Spoken Content in System Settings. Linux should have something similar. And, if it turns out that there is and I just don't have the proper package installed, I'll gladly change my tune to "distros should have this installed by default."

I've also seen this in Emacs packages like Ellama, where you have to set up Emacs Lisp calls to the right function with the right parameters inside your usepackage block, and it's hard for me to figure out how to add the openAI-compatible service that I have to Ellama. And AI hasn't helped yet.

So, having things being customizable is amazing. It really is. There are so many keyboard configuration settings, for example, that I think blind people are going to love playing with. But goodness, there needs to be something to change your system TTS stuff, and hopefully one day we can have a command to turn on and off the screen, like the iOS screen curtain so we can maintain privacy.

#Linux #accessibility #blind #LinuxDesktop #foss #tts

I gave a talk about #spiel and #speech #tts in #linux at on #GUADEC #GUADEC2024 in Denver.

Check it out:
youtu.be/xseIsaxrlXo?feature=s…

GUADEC 2024 The Whole Spiel - A New Speech Synthesis API

Eitan Isaacson presents this GUADEC 2024 Day 3, Track 1 talk.Screen reader users have relied on speech synthesis for a long time. In recent years, speech int...

^YouTube

Not sure if I've talked about this here, but there are like, tons of stuff here. I'm gonna try that Linux distro through Crostini on my old ChromeBook that I don't do anything else with anymore. The VM's over the Internet are really cool too! The AT Museum is cool. And I'm curious to see if the Windows 2000/XP on **Android** works. That'd be trippy.

nashcentral.duckdns.org/

#accessibility #blind #AssistiveTechnology #Linux #gaming #TTS #VirtalMachine #foss #Android

Pred pár dňami sme vďaka @Zvonimir Stanecic a ďalším dobrovoľníkom zverejnili prvý slovenský ženský hlas pre #rhvoice. Hlas dostal aj pekné netradičné meno Jasietka. K dispozícii sú hlasy pre #Windows #nvdasr #android aj #linux . Aktualizácie sa zároveň dočkala aj celková podpora pre slovenčinu, vrátane už skôr zverejneného slovenského hlasu Ondro. Ak potrebujete #tts #textToSpeech k čítaču obrazovky, na čítanie kníh, inštrukcie pre GPS navigáciu, pozrite si prosím podrobnosti na jednoduchom webe.

hlas.ondrosik.sk/

I wrote a Dart package for speech-dispatcher, enabling TTS on Linux. It also works with Flutter for Linux. The package supports most features of speech-dispatcher, with additional support for less commonly used functionality like history coming soon. It still needs broader testing, so feel free to open any issues you encounter. My hope is that one of the TTS packages for Flutter will start using it to add Linux support, as most, if not all, currently don't support Linux.

You can find the package on GitHub at github.com/the-byte-bender/dar… and on pub.dev at pub.dev/packages/dart_speechd.

#dart #flutter #tts #linux

GitHub - the-byte-bender/dart_speechd: Dart bindings for speech dispatcher, for text to speech on linux.

Dart bindings for speech dispatcher, for text to speech on linux. - the-byte-bender/dart_speechd

^GitHub

Great job @eeejay 👏. Even if i don't speak a word Arabic the Piper TTS improvement can absolutely be heard.

Btw. @Marco if you are interested in Piper usage or clone your voice for #tts maybe one or two of my video tutorials are helpful:
youtu.be/b_we_jma220
or youtu.be/GGvdq3giiTQ

TEXT TO SPEECH | Piper TTS on Windows 🚀 AI voice 10x faster Realtime!

Tutorial for using high quality, free text to speech AI voices in Microsoft Windows with Piper TTS. 🚀 Performance is up to 10x faster Realtime.00:00 Intro01...

^YouTube

For the past couple of months I've been working on Pied (pied.mikeasoft.com), an application that makes it easy to use modern, natural sounding, text-to-speech voices on Linux. It does this by integrating the Piper neural text-to-speech engine with speech-dispatcher, so most existing software will work with it out of the box.

The first beta version is now available in the snap store: snapcraft.io/pied

And available as a Flatpak from pied.mikeasoft.com

(Other package formats will follow)

I'd appreciate any feedback if you're able to test it, thanks!

#TTS #accessibility #ScreenReader #linux #TextToSpeech

Hello Fediverse,

We are looking for Text-To-Speak (TTS) expertise to help or advise us on improving the default voice of the Linux desktop. 📣

Please reach out or boost

Thanks!

#Linux #tts #accessibility #a11y #GNOME #KDE #FreeSoftware #freedesktop #ml

The default text to speech options on most (all?) linux distros are pretty outdated, so I'm working on a little tool to easily install and configure a more modern option (Piper) and fully integrate it with existing applications via speech-dispatcher

As a result of my fiddling around, I now have @popey narrating my every action through the Orca screen reader...

#TTS #linux #ScreenReader