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   Jeff Fortin T. (風の庭園のNekohayo) (nekohayo@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 00:09:25 JST Jeff Fortin T. (風の庭園のNekohayo)

   My eyes are so itchy and watery (presumably due to seasonal allergies) that I haven't been able to get much work done in the past few days. I'm writing this toot with my eyes closed most of the time. 😑

   Dear #accessibility hivemind, is there an easy way to have #Orca working with a natural-sounding text-to-speech voice, that is not eSpeak, but rather something like #MyCroft's Mimic3 ?

   What's the state of the art for screenreader TTS voices on #Linux and how do I get it in #Fedora?

   #a11y

   • Embed this notice
     Daimar Stein :tux: :comunista: (joojmachine@ursal.zone)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 00:09:24 JST Daimar Stein :tux: :comunista:

     in reply to

     @nekohayo Pied is always my go-to answer, easily insalling and managing Piper's voice models: https://github.com/Elleo/pied

   • Embed this notice
     Daimar Stein :tux: :comunista: (joojmachine@ursal.zone)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 01:22:34 JST Daimar Stein :tux: :comunista:

     in reply to

     @nekohayo Yeah, ever since I first heard about it my reading experience in Foliate and Firefox reader mode have been vastly superior. Glad it works and hope to see a better default voice model for speech-dispatcher someday

   • Embed this notice
     Jeff Fortin T. (風の庭園のNekohayo) (nekohayo@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 01:22:35 JST Jeff Fortin T. (風の庭園のNekohayo)

     in reply to

     • Daimar Stein :tux: :comunista:

     @joojmachine
     Oh my god, Pied JUST WORKS!
     I can't believe my ears! :psyduck:

     I just installed Pied's flatpak package, let it install Piper, then downloaded the best English voice I could find ("Lessac", the basis for most other voices), and told Pied to set it as the Speech Dispatcher voice…

     Now Orca sounds natural, and I can stand using it, for the first time in 20 years. :blobmiou:

     Video below demonstrates reading this post.

     #Orca #SpeechDispatcher #accessibility #Pied #Linux #texttospeech