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AudioGames.net Forum → General Game Discussion → Survey on screen reader Vs narration
Asking for a friend...
Apparently there was a survey a little while back that asked if blind people would rather have content read to them by a screenreader or by a professionally recorded voice. The survey was about blog posts, but could also partially apply to game speech.
Does anyone remember it, or better still, have a link to it?
I don't have any links, but can say that I'd always prefer a professionally recorded voice actor doing the reading over a TTS voice. That's a no brainer.
Screenreader actually came out on top. It was about blog posts specifically, so reading very long passages of text
I don't recall this survey.
I think even for a blog I'd personally prefer a human narrator if possible, indeed my lady and I regularly do a very good narrated game each day called Word of the day on Alexa that is quite a lot like that.
that being said, if you have content that changes in game, e.g character names, stats etc, a screen reader or sapi tts output is much more adaptable and thus better for game design.
The way I've always thought of it is that a recorded voice is like a video, be that a cut scene, video blog entry or whatever, while a screen reader like printed text.
Personally, I've never seen any reason to use human recorded voices over screen readers for gaming, aside from characters. Where a screen reader can be used, I'd say it should be given that everyone uses their screen reader differently with rate, punctuation settings etc. I don't really like having to wait for menus to finish speaking for instance so that I don't miss anything, given that my screen readers can be set to a relatively high rate.
Interesting question though, as I'm aware that there will be differing opinions.
I tend to agree with Dark here. Screen reader is better for everything other than games because it's dynamic, you can have it set very fast and the way you like it, so it increases productivity. For games, it's also better adaptable and thus makes the design easier, but of course a human voice will always be of a higher quality, or at least until something like Wavenet becomes widely available and commonly used. :-) So, where the experience matters, for character voices etc, it's better to have human narration, of course, but dynamically changing text is much easier to read and even to implement with a screen reader. Not to mention that *not* having dynamic text self-voiced supports the option of internationalization.
Lukas
@Sightless combat, While I absolutely agree with you that this is an area where there will be varying opinions, One thing I will say is to not confuse inequities in design with the method of delivery.
Inability to interrupt speech isn't unique to screen reader output at all, up until recently a lot of interpreters had this problem when using Sapi output.
Obviously any system of game output needs to responsive to what the user wants, but that responsiveness and efficiency isn't specific to the discussion of the actual sound and output itself.
For me screen readers haven't quite got to the point where I can get all nuances from text, especially with dialogue that I can with a human narrator.
The vocal rhythm word pauses and intonation quality just hasn't been worked out efficiently, though it improving all the time, quite aside from all the of actual showing emotions and voice colouring that a good performer can bring to any piece of text.
This is why, while I do plenty of work with screen readers and even play gamebooks, muds and other interactive titles with them, when reading for pleasure, or heck even when reading for my thesis which requires some hideously complex articles on ethics with long winded language, I will always choose a human narrator if the option is there.
Of course I use screen readers a great deal, and the ease of production, as well as customizability have their place too.
If I could choose the optimum I think I'd like to see games things like menus and numerical statss are read by screen reader, but the discourses and in game dialogues arer voice acted, ---- just like in A hero's call in fact 
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It was a twitter poll apparently! Fastfinge over at reddit/r/blind remembers it. Next to try to find it...
Again though it poll was about blog content specifically, the game specific stuff in this thread is cool 
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