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   13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Apr-2024 23:37:48 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

   in reply to

   • emmatonkin

   @emmatonkin @Jeffrey

   I only occasionally need support from screen reader software (my vision is bad but mostly correctable, but sometimes I can't use correction due to other medical issues. Eyes suck.) and I've been testing Piper + Orca lately.

   I recommend the resources linked above.

   Actually, I wrote a short tutorial about it that should be published next month - I'm happy to send over an early copy if it would be useful.

   Orca, the standard Gnome screenreader, by default uses standard eSpeak voices.

   I find these really grating, while Piper's neural voices are much more pleasant, particularly for listening to long passages of text if you're not very accustomed to eSpeak voices.

   However, Piper has some practical limitations. Notably, it's more processor intensive, which becomes more conspicuous on less powerful hardware. (It''s okay on an aarch64 Raspberry Pi 5, but I'd not go much below that in terms of spec).

   Also, while eSpeak can keep up with a fast typist (in its way), Piper isn't great for letter repetition. This becomes particularly conspicuous at the terminal.

   Your friend my also appreciate Speech Note, which is handy for partially sighted people who don't need a full time screen reader, as you can just paste in text to have it read to you using Piper voices (or others)

   https://flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.SpeechNote

   • Embed this notice
     emmatonkin (emmatonkin@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Apr-2024 23:37:49 JST emmatonkin

     in reply to

     @Jeffrey
     Also, a page here recommends Piper with Orca screen reader https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2023/dec/29/install-software-to-help-visually-impairedblind-people-use-linux/

     There's a youtube video introducing the use of Orca at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI76P-KPZec - I'm not familiar with it but it looks promising.

   • Embed this notice
     emmatonkin (emmatonkin@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Apr-2024 23:37:51 JST emmatonkin

     @Jeffrey
     You might find something useful on
     * https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2023/06/07/state-of-screen-reading-reading-on-desktop-linux/
     * https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2023/06/08/screen-reading-part-2-looking-at-coqui-tts/

     As far as text to speech goes, I use Piper text to speech as part of the Home Assistant setup. It sounds pretty nice to me as far as these things go. You can try different voices and languages on this page. https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/

     Brief discussion of piper config options setting voice speed ( –length_scale) and pause between sentences (–sentence_silence) here: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/tts-text-to-speech-in-linux-piper/