Hi all,
I was just skimming through the books topic and noted that many of you like Harry Potter. There are, of course, two audio versions of those available, but every fanfiction I've seen (which is of course popular in the blind community) is not available in audio form (other than Barb's psychic serpent series of course).
So I got to wondering about your views on reading with text to speech.
I had a Road Runner several years ago, which was a portable reading device. it had 3 MB internal memory and used a serial port to transfer books. It's long-since been discontinued, but was a marvelous little thing at the time. it used a doubletalk synthesizer.
of course almost every other portable reading machine on the market nowadays uses more Human-sounding voices - and I can't seem to get on with them at all. So I still use a book courier, on occasion, which is the successor to the road runner (it now uses flash cards and USB in place of internal memory and the serial port). It still uses doubletalk to speak, though, and runs on two AA batteries, which are the two factors that mean I'll keep it for as long as I can.
but, even with that, I find myself preferring to read with eloquence, because I'm just so used to it. Since JAWS 5 introduced a speech and sounds manager, I think it was v 5, I've found myself loving the "quotation voice" feature. having just a slightly different voice to differentiate dialogue from narrative makes the reading experience much better for me.
I reread harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone a few months back. My original listen on the radio when I was 13 took me 8 and a half hours. my reread with eloquence? 118 minutes.
so, your views on synthesizers, on EBooks versus audio and so forth, would be quite interesting.