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AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → jaws 16 beta: death of screen reader innovation illustrated
ESpeak is really incomprehensive, and the quality is bad.
I have downloaded all vocalizers that I need for jaws, I ment vocalizer expressive voices and I didn't purchase them. They are free. I think you can download them even if you bought the Jaws, right?
Afrim, yes, I am a native English speaker. I am a regular red blooded American. However, that doesn't mean It doesn't matter what kind of synthesizer I use. I'm aware that Eloquence does better with some foreign languages than does Espeak, but that only comes back to my point which is better or worse largely depends on need. I don't see paying extra for a voice that can speak excellent French, Spanish, German, etc because I have no need for it. If I did my opinion would be different. As it is for day to day stuff I prefer a good American voice like Vocalizer Tom.
Besides you seemed to have missed my point about the Vocalizer voices which is they are not free no matter what screen reader you use. Just because Freedom Scientific doesn't make you pay extra for the Vocalizer and Realspeak voices does not mean you get them for free. The cost for them is included in your Jaws license or SMA. Why do you think they charge you $1,000 up front for the screen reader?
The answer is obvious. You are not just paying for the screen reader software, but you are also paying all kinds of royalty fees for Eloquence, the Vocalizer voices, Realspeak, etc which are bundled with it. If you don't understand this very basic business practice then you need to. Companies like Freedom Scientific never give anything away for free and there is always a fee attached even if it isn't obvious. If you don't buy Jaws, don't have a Jaws license, then you can not use those Vocalizer voices. Therefore, yes, you are most definitely paying for them weather you know it or not.
As for NVDA add-ons some of them are commercial. The NVDA screen reader is licensed under the general public licence agreement meaning that all of its stock or core components must be free and open source. Something like Eloquence and the Vocalizer voices are neither free or open source so can not ship with NVDA legally. There is an OCR add-on for NVDA that does what Jaws does by taking a picture of the screen and performs OCR on it, but once again that add-on is a commercially licensed add-on so can't ship with NVDA for that reason alone.
So to answer your question there are legal restrictions upon distributing certain add-ons with NVDA simply do to the type of license of the screen reader. If it were under a commercial license like Jaws things would be different, but it is not. NVDA users like myself are willing to simply install various add-ons separately to get similar or same functionality as Jaws for a reduced price.
Bro, Sorry to say, but, ESpeak, not only does a worse performance with foreign languages, but also with English itself.
Then again, I must put attention at this point, as for a native English speaker it doesn’t matter what kind of synthesizer he/she uses because it’s your native language, which you use everyday, and not like us who learn it in school or by following special courses. ESpeak is also worse than some other vocalizers like Daniel, Samantha and Tom. They have a better accent.
But again, for me as an Albanian it’s better eloquence. It offers a greater performance not only with English, but also with my language. Though I like mostly British accent, I can’t change to Daniel, Sorena or any product of Ivona.
Moreover, We are not talking about certain people or countries, we are talking about all in general. Jaws, as well as NVDA are not designed only for English.
Let’s make an example, how would you feel if the main language of Jaws or NVDA was French, Spanish or Italian?
Basically, if you take a look at all languages of Jaws and NVDA, you’ll make out that the main language of the product does the best performance.
In this case, the main language is English, and obviously it will do a better performance.
So we should think not only about English people all over the world, but also about other people who speak different languages. The only one who does this better is obviously Eloquence. It’s super-integrated with English, and offers a good experience even with foreign languages.
Wish you all a good time!
Actually, I read an article a while back about someone from Finland who basically said that Eloquence's Finnish language was quite pathetic. Eloquence is not in Dutch so I'm afraid I can't comment on that, but I still think it's personal preference. I also can't agree with your statement about native English speakers not really caring what synth they use. Some like Ivona better and some prefer the vocalizer voices, not necessarily because of their pronounciation but also because of the general quality/intonation. I'm not a native speaker but I for one really disliked cepstral because the intonation was just weird, even though the general sound was decent enough.
ESpeak's pronounciation and general robotic sound used to make me die a little inside whenever I was exposed to it. I've been able to deal with it somewhat better nowadays because I don't care as much anymore, though I don't think I would ever use it as my primary synthesizer because the pronounciation is just pitiful. But hey, if you're used to it and don't care, then who are we to argue that you should use something else.
The concept of addons has both advantages and disadvantages. Needing to get them separately is a bit of an inconvenience, but honestly nothing more than that. You already have to do the same with JAWS except NVDA has less programs supported by default.
I still wouldn't use NVDA as primary screen reader because I dislike the object navigation and other such things too much for it to be effective. But I'm fine with using it for things that JAWS can't handle too well, even though I still feel JAWS should have no trouble with these applications at all.
Oh, and Afrim, have you tried opening a 500 page word document with word 2010 and Windows 7? You don't really notice the sluggishness until the file gets pretty big, but seeing how most of my study books are around this size I definitely notice some pretty ugly slowdowns on JFW.
Well, isn't easier for a native english speaker to understand ESpeak?
I don't think that a native english deals with more difficulties rather than a beginner or even an advanced english speaker.
and yes, but almost 100 pages, it didn't show any big problem.
Nope, 100 pages isn't enough I'm afraid. I don't think you really see a difference if it's less than 300. It gets worse if you have footnotes and other such stuff.
I also know of a good few people who are very advanced English speakers and have great difficulties understanding true dialects like somebody who speaks very Scottish etc. The same would go for speech synthesizers I imagine.
It also depends what you're used to. If you're used to ESpeak then other forms of English will probably be more difficult to understand.
but it's not the same a native english speaker with an advanced english speaker right? I agree that the one synthesizer you are get used to becomes much familiar with you and you understand almost every word, but, for a native english it's easier. You are from deutch, so, it's easier for you to speak deutch, rather than english, right? The same would go for a synthesizer. Because it's your language, and I think you know all dialects and prononciations very good, so it's definitely easier. It would be such true, if this phrase came to me.
Oh heck no, don't even get me started on Dutch dialects. Some are just impossible for me to understand... lol.
I will admit to preferring Eloquence myself, yes. Wish it were on OS X. And indeed, it is very well integrated into JAWS for Windows.
BTW, and to diverge from this subthread, FS just announced the 90-day licence, allowing you to purchase, for $2 a day, a rolling 90-day subscription to JAWS professional. This was targeted at web devs (and I'll spare the rant on why I think this is ethically questionable) but essentially represents a new way to pay up for JAWS, or to acquire it for lesser purposes. Just FYI.
Did the announcement say that money you spent towards the 90=day licenses would be put against the purchase of a full license? If so, then FS finally has something like a payment plan, which would be a big change in the affordabililty of their software for individual purchasers.
That is correct.
Do keep in mind, til the free version of Window-eyes, (WE For Office came out, they had a "payment" plan. So all freedom is doing, is picking up where GW Micro/AISquared left off.
This is a really good piece that does a better job than me trying to articulate my thoughts on jaws 16's release.
http://joeorozco.com/blog_my_complaint_ … scientific
Though I've not contacted technical support before and haven't verified if they're as terrible as the article makes it to be, I agree on most of the other points raised. Thoughts?
I haven't contacted support enough to say either way if this article is correct there, but the few times that I have, would indecate that there may be a bit of a reason to complain. Anyway, looking at the features of 16, I really can't justified updating. The thing is that if 17 has something I really need, I will have to pay for 16 and 17 just to get 17. I have to agree about the pro and home argument. After all, just looking at the website, I wouldn't know why I would go pro over home. Does the home licence only allow me to run the full version on just one system? If I put it on my own laptop that I'm using for home use and then start using it for work at a later date, what then? Why would I want to update to pro? what is keeping me troothful. LOL.
The rationale is to charge business users or people who install jaws in schools more, because they should be able to pay more.
Hello all,
While some though are sadly true, it's still strange to see here no comment at all, and even nobody mentionning the only real worth new feature of jaws 16: the introduction of MathML support; and for a first trial, it's not so badly made.
I would have loved to have this feature only 2-3 years before, when I had still vector calculus and linear algebra courses at university. I hope that FS will pursuit in this direction, to help thousends of students struggling with math at college or university.
While all the rest is more or less usless bull shit news, we have still a very nice innovation here (that should have appeared ages ago but it's another discussion).
That being said, I don't especially defend FS. I feeled exactly the same as you last year when jaws 15 went out. Their biggest problems remain their legendary crazyness about authorizations, and the fact that they don't listen to user's needs to decide what to do whatever you might say.
There are scripts that I've been using from the latex access project that convert latex into spoken speech. I find that a lot more valuable, because it would be more useful than Jaw's MathML support - MathMl is meant for reading, not editing, while you can do both in latex.
There are scripts that I've been using from the latex access project that convert latex into spoken speech. I find that a lot more valuable, because it
would be more useful than Jaw's MathML support - MathMl is meant for reading, not editing, while you can do both in latex.
Last time I checked, existing plugins used stupid SAPI voices, didn't allow navigation within the expressions or only in a limited fashion, and weren't translated into other languages than english; at least one of these three.
Being able to navigate in the expression freely in a quite logical way as FS did it, and have it all read by your usual screen reader voice with your usual settings, is so much superior. You can read the expression logical block by logical block rather than word by word and understand it at your speed.
You are right about editing; however, wheither for reading or editing, LaTeX is and will still be quite a pain. There are now popular libraries that convert from LaTeX to MathML, MathJax can do it for example. This same MathJax introduces also a third mode, ASCIIMath, which seems at first to be a good compromise for editing: allmost as powerful as LaTeX (at least for the most common usages) without its verbosity and its difficulty.
Well, I haven't ran across math ml yet, but it sounds to me like fs has done a great job with it, and it will be extremely usefull for me as I am in school. No screen reader can use that yet. And as aminel said, most of these pluggins use SAPI5 voices.
And jaws is so expensive. and we all sit here and wonder why people use cracked copies of jaws? hey fs, lower your prices!
I wonder if they will update window-eyes after 8.4? and give window-eyes OCR addon? I hope so. I think window-eyes is faster than jaws is.
I added a comment to this post.
TL;DR: JAWS 16 now splits dongle owners from their ILM authorisation. You may now no longer possess both ILM and dongle on the same serial number. Needless to say I am pissed.
Interesting. I played with Voiceover this past few days, and all I got to say is that if windows narrator ever becomes as good, then JAWS is clearly doomed. Now I guess that it is time for my evil scientific laugh of freedom from JAWS, or is it? If I ever get around to putting a VM copy of windows on my mac book pro, I am questioning what screen reader I will go with. I'm thinking NVDA. If all I will do with that VM is to play games, then it will be nvda, but if I need more, I don't know... By the way, does any one see those sharks circling this here ship we are on? may be we should close the windows, or should I say the hatches?
Hey everyone, since the topic of Narrator came up, here some links for yall:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind … =windows-8
https://support.office.com/en-gb/articl … 5b64e8cfb2
and
http://winaero.com/blog/windows-10-feat … d-cortana/
Talking about Math ML, see this webinar that Freedom did not too long ago:
http://freedomscientific.com/Services/T … tail/F0104
Do keep in mind however, Chromevox had Math ML support first.
Please see:
http://www.chromevox.com/release_notes.html
, then hit the button at the bottom, to expand the notes.
The latest chromevox, Release notes aren't the ones on the page, though that doesn't matter for this discussion.
On To a mixture of Freedom and GW Micro/AI things now...
Yes, Jaws For Windows has taken over the payment plan that GW/AI had earlier, and hopefully the 90 day monthly pricing isn't terrible. I agree that besides the Math ML thing, Freedom got some catching up to do honestly with adding real features. Back to the Window-Eyes happenings, you can now read the read me for beta one and future betas at:
http://gwmicro.com/beta
If you check out my Guess What Thread , a fairly nice discussion is going on bout the beta too.
Will Narrator one day replace Jaws, Window-eyes, and even NVDA? It truly is a big possibility that it can. The key is for more people to use it, spread your tips and tricks for what works and what doesn't at the time, and once scripting and Braille Display support comes to Narrator in Windows 10, teach folks how it works, and how it can be used your daily life.
Unless Jo Stinecamp does the podcast series first, the name he gave it, was called: "Nothing But Narrator." It would be cool for a podcaster to start a series on Windows for the blind, featuring Windows Phone, Windows PC, news on Windows from a blindness perspective, even getting people from Microsoft to interview on the show. If Narrator is indeed coming to the XBox, I would like to hear how that would work!
As for me, getting a Chromebook for Christmas, but that's all I'll say here about that, and create a separate thread.
Keep well folks, keep well!
Just sharing here, that post 74 was edited 3 times.. Wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything!
AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → jaws 16 beta: death of screen reader innovation illustrated
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