Hello, concerning the question TTS, I quite like IVONA! But IVONA is merely TTS software, it does not offer the same as JAWS would do for instance ('reading' the system - at least I do not think it does). It is pretty cheap (in comparison); you buy the software and then you buy the voices (with the accents) you like or that work well for you and in the languages that you need. For instance, she might needs (Canadian) English and (Canadian) French, she would only need to buy the software once and then buys the languages on top of that.
What I specifically liked about IVONA is that they can be pretty good with pacing, pitch etc. This really enabled the listening process. You can also change the speed of reading and, for ex, include smaller or larger breaks after full stops and paragraphs (etc)
See here: http://www.ivona.com/en/
Ah, and if I recall correctly, it also reads protected pdf's, though you would not be able to export those to mp3 (others you can). So she can export articles and go jogging ;-).
Hope this helps,
Best wishes,
Dyi
Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg
PhD Candidate in Sociology, University of Manchester
[log in to unmask]
http://manchester.academia.edu/DieuwertjeDyiHuijg
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From: The Disability-Research Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of DISABILITY-RESEARCH automatic digest system [[log in to unmask]]
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Subject: DISABILITY-RESEARCH Digest - 27 Feb 2014 to 28 Feb 2014 (#2014-47)
There are 7 messages totaling 647 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. JLCDS revised CFP: Disability and Blood
2. best text to speech software? (6)
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Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 09:28:51 +0000
From: "Dr. David Bolt" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: JLCDS revised CFP: Disability and Blood
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies – Revised Call for Papers
Special Issue: Disability and Blood
Guest Editors: Michael Davidson and Sören Fröhlich (UCSD)
Since the HIV/AIDS blood feuds of the 1990s, scholarship into social and cultural definitions of blood has provided much-needed insights into statistical (Tukufu Zuberi), economical (Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell), and medical constructions of what blood was, is and how it can function (Keith Wailoo). This special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) aims to close a gap in considerations of disability and blood. What does blood mean in cultural constructions of disability? How are disability and the body’s fluid tissue related in literary and cultural productions? Blood seems omnipresent in cultural representations, ranging from mass-murderers and pure-blooded wizards, vampires, and the undead, to ritual uncleanness, illegitimate Presidential offspring, and pre-natal diagnostics. Be it in the blood work chart and diagnostics, in statistics of pathology, or in other definitions of individuals through blood, ‘abnormalities’ in the blood constitute disability just as disability qualifies blood itself. Yet blood always transgresses boundaries and destabilizes categories; it simultaneously defines and defies constructions of disabled and disability. We invite submissions from scholars who consider how blood functions in the construction of disability. Is it stable or fluid, definable or contagious, visible or hidden? How does blood make the crip, and how does the crip change the blood? How is either or are both abjected from the ‘normal’ to create what Lennard J. Davis calls a “diverse sameness?”
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- The female body as disabled, menarche, menstruation, birth,
- Race as disability, disability as race, the “one-drop rule,”
- Scientific racism, racial historiography and disability,
- Eugenics in cultural productions,
- Gendered disability, gendered blood,
- Medical discourses,
- Blood in treatments, procedures, and as medical commodity,
- Contagion and infection, conversely, immunization and vaccination,
- Purity and pollution as disabling discourses,
- Disability and blood in religious discourses,
- Containment and rupture as definitions of disability,
- Pathology and normalization of blood,
- Migration, exile, asylum and definitions of blood,
- Indigeneity, inheritance, lineage and disabilities,
- Representations of bleeding and blood.
Please email a one-page proposal [log in to unmask] by June 1, 2014. Contributors can expect to be selected and notified by August 1, 2014. (Full drafts of the selected articles will be due on February 1, 2015). Please direct any questions to Sören Fröhlich.
For further information about JLCDS please contact Dr. David Bolt ([log in to unmask]).
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Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 14:37:53 -0300
From: LILITH Finkler <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: best text to speech software?
Dear Folks: A colleague of mine in rural Canada is wondering what might be the best most up to date text to speech software.She has diabetic retinopathy and has tried Dragon which she does not think works that well. Do you have anysuggestions for software that she could use? If you send e-mails to the list, I will pass them on to her. Thanks so much for your assistance. Lilith
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Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 11:13:43 -0700
From: Arielle M Silverman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: best text to speech software?
Hi Lilith,
Dragon is speech-to-text, not text-to-speech. If she has diabetic
retinopathy, sounds like she needs text-to-speech.
If she uses a Mac computer, there is excellent software called
VoiceOver already built in. If she uses a PC, JAWS for Windows is
probably the leading software application, but it is expensive. There
are free alternatives like NVDA and System Access, but I have less
experience with them.
If you could clarify what she needs the text-to-speech for I might be
able to help more.
Best,
Arielle
On 2/28/14, LILITH Finkler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Folks: A colleague of mine in rural Canada is wondering what might be
> the best most up to date text to speech software.She has diabetic
> retinopathy and has tried Dragon which she does not think works that well.
> Do you have anysuggestions for software that she could use? If you send
> e-mails to the list, I will pass them on to her. Thanks so much for your
> assistance. Lilith
> ________________End of message________________
>
> This Disability-Research Discussion list is managed by the Centre for
> Disability Studies at the University of Leeds
> (www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies).
>
> Enquiries about list administration should be sent to
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Archives and tools are located at:
> www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
>
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Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 11:52:05 -0500
From: Andrea Shettle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: best text to speech software?
Dragon Naturally Speaking is a speech recognition software that converts
your speech into text and can be helpful for people who can no longer use
the key board well but may be able to see the screen. From what I've
heard, it's pretty much the best speech recognition software on the
market, at least for English. It is usually better to have a fairly
recent version. And you do need to take time to "train" it (i.e., when you
say something into the microphone and the software prints out something
different from what you meant, you then need to program it so it knows
that THIS is the way you pronounce word X, Y, or Z so that it will put the
correct word on the screen in the future. And you need to keep doing this
every time Dragon does something wrong, so I imagine it can seem
cumbersome in the beginning particularly if you have an accent, but easier
to use later on on as it learns more of your vocabulary).
However, if your friend needs text to speech software (i.e, software that
will convert digital text on the screen into synthesized speech for people
who cannot see the screen well), then the best software in English that
I've heard of is JAWS, which unfortunately can be expensive to purchase.
There is also NVDA, which people can download from the web for free and
does some of the same things that JAWS does.
Am not an expert, but have met or known people who use some of these
software systems or have tried them.
Andrea
> Dear Folks: A colleague of mine in rural Canada is wondering what might be
> the best most up to date text to speech software.She has diabetic
> retinopathy and has tried Dragon which she does not think works that well.
> Do you have anysuggestions for software that she could use? If you send
> e-mails to the list, I will pass them on to her. Thanks so much for your
> assistance. Lilith
> ________________End of message________________
>
> This Disability-Research Discussion list is managed by the Centre for
> Disability Studies at the University of Leeds
> (www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies).
>
> Enquiries about list administration should be sent to
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Archives and tools are located at:
> www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
>
> You can VIEW, POST, JOIN and LEAVE the list by logging in to this web
> page.
>
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 20:17:50 +0000
From: Rebecca Jay Dutneall <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: best text to speech software?
Hi,
The first programme I used was Via Voice, then when I started at
University I was introduced to Dragon and Read and Write Gold, where I
use predictive text, it does have speech input but it's very reliable.
It might be worth, if it's available in Canada, and, assuming that
s/he has a smartphone, to look at the mobile version of Dragon so than
the translation could be sent from the phone to the location. I don't
know if JAWS has text to speech function.
Hope this helps!
Becky.
----- Message from [log in to unmask] ---------
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 14:37:53 -0300
From: LILITH Finkler <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: LILITH Finkler <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: best text to speech software?
To: [log in to unmask]
> Dear Folks: A colleague of mine in rural Canada is wondering what
> might be the best most up to date text to speech software.She has
> diabetic retinopathy and has tried Dragon which she does not think
> works that well. Do you have anysuggestions for software that she
> could use? If you send e-mails to the list, I will pass them on to
> her. Thanks so much for your assistance. Lilith
> ________________End of message________________
>
> This Disability-Research Discussion list is managed by the Centre
> for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds
> (www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies).
>
> Enquiries about list administration should be sent to
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Archives and tools are located at:
> www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
>
> You can VIEW, POST, JOIN and LEAVE the list by logging in to this web page.
>
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:50:08 -0000
From: Larry Arnold <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: best text to speech software?
I know that I am appointed by his Satanic majesty as the Devil's own cynic.
I have had experience with the other way round, that is to say speech to
text, and unfortunately did not have good experience with Dragon Dictate
because it predicted all sorts of things I did not want to say and made a
right mess of it all, for all the learning of speech it claimed to be
capable of it clearly could not speak Coventry.
Text to speech in my experience fares better with more phonetic spellings, I
don't know whether it is clever enough yet to discern accent and other
subtle stuff and return a lot of meaning. I would seriously suggest stuff
the software cos the human agent can do it much better. In the ideal world
the human can translate text to speech a damn sight better than the
algorithm but you see we live in this world and you read your Marx arightly
you will see what is wrong with machines back from the days of the cropper
lads of high renown.
The answer is humanism, of co-operation and self help.
Larry
From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of LILITH Finkler
Sent: 28 February 2014 17:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: best text to speech software?
Dear Folks: A colleague of mine in rural Canada is wondering what might be
the best most up to date text to speech software.She has diabetic
retinopathy and has tried Dragon which she does not think works that well.
Do you have any
suggestions for software that she could use? If you send e-mails to the
list, I will pass them on to her. Thanks so
much for your assistance. Lilith
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Disability Studies at the University of Leeds
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[log in to unmask]
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:50:32 -0000
From: Larry Arnold <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: best text to speech software?
Does it 'eck as like!
Larry
-----Original Message-----
From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andrea Shettle
Sent: 28 February 2014 16:52
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: best text to speech software?
Dragon Naturally Speaking is a speech recognition software that converts
your speech into text
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End of DISABILITY-RESEARCH Digest - 27 Feb 2014 to 28 Feb 2014 (#2014-47)
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