John.Sanfilippo@f608.n107.z1.fidonet.org (John Sanfilippo) (08/23/90)
Index Number: 9962
[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]
Doug,
I'm going right thru the TABLE OF CONTENTS of the VE manual
... and making comments on things as I find things I'd like to
comment on.
First some basic background: I have my PC and SoundingBoard for
one year and am using Softvert (That's what they use where I
work). Curiosity and need prompted me to request a VE demo.
SECTION 1: INTRODUCING VOCAL-EYES!
1.5 An open letter to macro users
I could see where macros would be absolutely necessary in any
system where you must press several keys to get a single thing
done.
SECTION 2: INSTALLING AND LOADING VOCAL-EYES
2.2 The Sounding Board software
It is interesting that sentence pause is controlled by this
software, rather than by VE. I would have thought that sentence
and word pause could be controled from somewhere in the review
menu, or Voice Control Pannel. As you may have seen in another
message, I am VERY FOND of the pause following a sentence,
however small. Bravo!
SECTION 4: INTRODUCING THE VOCAL-EYES VOICE CONTROL PANEL
4.4.4 Screen tone
It would be nice to be able to assign various colors and
hilights to pitch and tone, as well as being able to have colors
spoken and enumerated. For instance, I might assign the combo
"anything on white or inverse background" is pitch 7, tone j,
and dark brown on black (unlikely) as pitch 2, tone b. This
would give me instant recognition of screen attributes without
saying any more to disturb what's on screen or in the text.
4.4.5 The punctuation submenu
Do I understand correctly that one may have both the default and
the dictionary pronunciation for a given character spoken? If
so, what on earth for? I can see one or the other ...
4.4.8 The repeat filter
I would have set to say only one of the many. I don't care how
many, and if I did, I'd just go into review and find out. With
my filter set to allow only one or two repeated characters thru,
I am aware that there may be more, and don't need to be told how
many more there are.
4.4.9 The repeat value
4.4.10 Blank lines
A short pip for a blank line, or measured, brief silence is just
fine.
4.5.6 Interruptability
Interruptability as implimented by VE is something I have been
craving for a LONG time! Bravo!! The ability to shut things up
with the press of ANY KEY is just grand!!
SECTION FIVE: SAVING YOUR WORK
Being able to save your work from review is another thing I
love! There is nothing worse than not being able to shell to dos
from some program after you have been working hard on setting up
your speech environment, and then having your batch file replace
that environment without having saved your work. I know: I
could change the batch file, etc., but this feature as is is
great.
5.5 Where Vocal-Eyes looks for your .SET files
This is another very hip thing: that you could be in Oshkosh,
and VE will look for the set file from whence VE came!! BRavo!!
5.6 Vocal-Eyes' default .SET file
... and you can have >9< of them loaded and ready to go!!
That's also nice. But, re macros, suppose you happen to need
more than 10 windows? Don't you need a macro to swop sets and
get into the window of your choice???
SECTION 6: CURSOR KEYS AND HOT KEYS
6.3.1 Defining your own cursoring keys
I tried defining mine like SV's and found that I could not
define ctrl-comma, or alt-ctrl-U.
SECTION 7: VOCAL-EYES' 10 SCREEN WINDOWS
7.6 The "silent" window
I need to practice and study this matter more. I kinda dislike
being stuck within a window. I DO like very much the idea of
being able to define the window type and not have to run a
special silent window program. I'd like to be able to override
the saving of the last window accessed .... ah, I just gotta get
used to it.
7.12 Reading a temporary window
Ahah! Can this temp window be accessed anytime? Can it be saved
into, say an unused window spot and thus recalled? Can it be
recalled from temporary storage with the press of a key? If
not, do I need to store it in a macro if my 9 other windows are
all precious and unusable?
SECTION 8: POP UP WINDOWS, VIDEO ATTRIBUTES AND LIGHT BARS
MIDI software is a definite test of this and I just gotta get up
the guts to try it. I'm not using all the stuff my current
package has to offer! Don't know why I'm scared to try.
8.3 Screen attributes
This is where my comments on pitch and tone should go.
SECTION 9: A POTPOURRI OF FEATURES
9.2.8 Sound effects internal speaker/off/Sounding Board
Nice idea!
9.2.10 Set bell position
Is there a way to tell you've moved from one line to another
while cursoring right in WP? WP will wrap forever and you will
never know that you've moved to another line.
9.4 Setting and using markers
This is a great idea!!
9.8 Block write
I have to try block write, but it sounds great! I suppose if i
were not in my editor and wanted to save something I'd have to
get to dos and say copy con xyz and hit my blockwrite key. How
about a way to just write the block to some file?
APPENDIX H: THE SOUNDING BOARD SOFTWARE
Spelling alpha/numeric words
I guess mispronunciations are the province of the SoundingBoard
dictionary?
I wonder if it would be possible and practical to have the *.set
files and *.dic files all as ASCII files which the user could
edit in any word processor? This, I believe, would give fast
and easy access to settings, and make it easy to "mix and match"
as needed. ( The fact that these files as currently implimented
[I'm not using a spell checker] are separately loadable is a
definite boon!)
--
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Internet: John.Sanfilippo@f608.n107.z1.fidonet.orgcampbell%hpdmd48@hplabs.HP.COM (Gary Campbell) (09/04/90)
Index Number: 10040 A possible feature for whatever screen reader writer wants to consider it: I haven't investigated the architecture of Windows yet, but I have thought of how we might try to gain access to it. If there were a place in the architecture where a user-supplied driver could be inserted that could intercept text before it turns into bits, one might be able to make a fake screen buffer of text that would follow the bitmap screen. If the screen reader had an option that would allow the user to specify an arbitrary address for the video memory, then someone who came up with such an adaptation for Windows or anything else could tell the screen reader to look at this fake video buffer instead of the screen. I also think that the ability to programatically execute speech reader functions would allow someone to write programs which could control the speech system to make an integrated solution without reimplementing screen reading functions. One could, for example, set a window to a particular area of the screen needed for a given program function, etc. The access could be an interrupt, possibly a user-specified one to allow one to avoid something used by another program. -- Gary Campbell campbell%hpdmd48.BOI.HP.COM@hplabs.HP.COM
Jan.Parker@p0.f89.n129.z1.fidonet.org (Jan Parker) (09/19/90)
Index Number: 10445
[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]
Hi Gary,
What you say about windows would be nice, but as I understand
it, windows doesn't directly allow external programs to hook in unless
they have been compiled under windows. There may be a way around
this since a lot of DOS users run windows under DOS it may sound silly
but a lot of people don't want to mess with their boot structure,
what could be done in this scenario would be a keyboard/I-O trapper,
as a device driver under DOS before windows.
The other possibility that hits me right now would be a variation
on what is called O.C.R. software. This software was designed for
scanners to be able to generate charactor codes from a variety of
fonts. The problem with O.C.R.'s is a vast amount of memry that they
eat. Within windows "or even DOS itself" you have a very limited
and exact charactor set. It might be possible to rebuild an O.C.R.
program to scan the screen for the charactor set, and tie into the
synthesizer that way.
On silly question: I am a sighted person with very little
exposure to synthesizers except for some shareware stuff like may
Max Headroom and Talk. Is there a standard way to interface with
the synthesizers, or is there somewhere that I could get more information
on attatching to synthesizers that are out there?
We're working on our own "Talking" software but that will take
a while to develop. In the mean time I was wondering if there were
ways that we could tie our softwware directly to synthesizers.
Rich and Jan Parker
Thunderhead Software
--
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