All amazon needs to do is to make all the importain features of their E-Book reader accessible to the blind, then they can play the blind needs the same access as the sighted card. Rather or not they do that is a good question. amazon does have TTS on their reader. I don't know where all it can be use but they allowing book publishers to disable this feature in their books if they want to. I only heard of one doing this and I think it was randem house. That's if my sorces are right. Leo and some of his people talk about this a little bit on this week's twit eppresode. The sight is twit.tv. I wish I could use the kindle, because of all the books I could buy for the device. It might be a good thing I can't because my pocket book would be empty. Then again I don't know how accessible it is for sure.

I agree with the PDF thing. Yes I know I can convert it to text and send it over, but PDF files have some navigation features among being the most used file format on the web. How much if any do you think the NFB will ster up on this whole thing? The whole wireless thing is making me really want a kindle...

Victor Reader Stream does indeed use RealSpeak. At least the version I have in the UK does at any rate. You'll find it has two voices it uses, one of them seems to be prerecorded male speech and the other is a female synthesised speech which I belive to be Realspeak. Don't recall if it was US female or UK female.

If the Kindel was allowed to continue with TTS then it might get to a point where we can convince them to make it accessible. I would love to have something that can read PDFs complete with the bookmarks, as I said it'd be hugely useful for RPG rulebooks.

Sorry about the Realspeak comment. I guess you are right, but when I think of Realspeak, I think of the Realspeak that you get with the extra JAWS CDs. Something that (and I guess this is based more on engine than installed voices) when there is a question mark at the end of a line, it sounds somewhat like a question. With the US voices, no matter what the sentence is, it just sounded like the same thing (from my experiences). Same tone of voice, questions were comments were exclamations. I guess I was just a bit spoiled is all.

As for the Pacmate reading PDFs, that is a totally different type of system. That is like apples to oranges. Pacmates are "PDAs" (although my Dell axim, foldable keyboard, and screen reader seem to work better for me) so the PM is a different catagory. The Pacmates use (depending on what version of the PM you have) a different version of the Windows OS, and is supposed to be "a VI/blind friendly PDA" where as the Reader Stream/Booksense/Bookport are just portable readers for the VI, with no advanced  computing power.

Congrats though on getting your Victor stream. I hope to have a couple of bucks saved up for one somewhat shortly.

True PM compared to the victor are like comparing apple to oranges. I guess what I was saying, if I wanted to read PDF files on the road I could take the PM. then again I could take my laptop for that persific job. I understand why one would not go with a PM. heck, I don't know what I'll go with next for a PDA. As for the real speak voices on the victor stream, they sound like what came with JAWS, but worse. It sounds a little fuzzy, like you were hearing over a radio. I guess these voices were compressed in someway for mobile devices. I can tell you, for sure these are realspeak voices, just not as clear. They might be around 16khz instead of 22khz.I wonder why the notes feature is on the victor in the first place?

Yeah, understanding that the voices are actually Realspeak on the Victor Reader stream (very bad wording on my choice), I think that the voices have absolutely no change in them at all throughout any sentence/question/whatever. That is the thing I am "complaining" about. I mean, they aren't horrible, I just wish that they have a little inflection in them is all.
A question sounding like a question, a sentence like a sentence, and all that jazz. That is one reason I loooooved my bookport.

You know, I was looking into getting a used PM to carry with me, but then I realized something. For what most older ones were going for, I could do better. I weighed in the netbooks and decided that because battery time was an issue, they weren't for me. People wanted way too much that I found for the PMs, and if it had a refreshable brailler, then it was way out of the question. Still like to get my hands on the refreshable brailler though, but that is a different topic...

As for portability and battery power, I carry, like I said, my little Dell PDA and a folding bluetooth keyboard. I can play book based games on it, I have found a dice rolling program for it so I can now roll my own dice when out gaming, I copy movies that I have into my computer and transfer them to that so I have a portable player, use it as my address/phone number/email contact book, and with the batteries I have for it, I have many many hours of use (yes, unfortunately, I did say batterIES). It has wireless built in, bluetooth and seems to do most of what I need a small thing like that to do, for cheaper than a used PM and longer than a netbook, but unfortunately nowheres near the computing power of a laptop. I still have to see if there is any Adobe reading software, or anything that is PDA/portable based (anything for Windows Mobile 5 works on it, so I am happy for that) along with setting up Mobile Outlook on it because the "mini browser" version of IE doesn't like GMail the best (although that could just be Pocket Hal).

So back to topic, how do you like your Stream so far? It'll be a little while before I can honestly consider buying one, but (like I said) unless the Booksense happens to be better for the same price, or even about the same, for way cheaper, then the Stream it is. Gee, I wish I could fast forward time a little to the point to where I can afford that. *drools*

*edits*

Sorry, I was going to answer this but forgot at first. If you are talking about the ability to "take notes" on the Victor, it is for when you bookmark, or need a little voice recorder. You can either just record a note/message/whatever and play it later, or you can add an audio bookmark, placing the bookmark where you need to, and then placing a note like writing in the margin of a textbook. It is a good thing  for school/studying. If you know all that, and you meant something else by the notes thing, I apologize.

I hope this isn't kicking a dead horse...

I've got a Victor Stream and an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is not accessible, but the TTS is decent. If you order a book for the Kindle, you CAN convert it into HTML to put on the Stream. Works great with dictionaries that I need for college. Heading navigation and all! I was extremely worried about the TTS lockout with publishers, but we've got ways of defending our basic rights to material just as sighted folks do.

Cheers,

PS - Anyone know of a way to convert PDFs to HTML, that retains headings? Looking to convert some PDF dictionaries.

As far as having certain rights as a blind or visually impaired person, you are totally correct. As a matter of fact, it has been stated that (not wording exactly) if there is a book and it is not in an accessible format, it is legal to take what means is necessary to do so. (at least here in the United States).

That means that you can take a full, "real" book and scan it into your computer, pay some one to read it or if it's in an electronic format that isn't accessible to the visually impaired/blind, then you can *legally* crack, code-break, and convert it thank you supreme court). I'll have to find where this has been brought up before, but it's there. I know its on the Blind Confidential site (greaking amazing site that is unbiased as far as sponsorship from VI groups - or at least used to be, haven't been there in a while).

As far as taking a PDF and converting it to HTML with headings, I think there are ways, albeit timely and somewhat difficult, but I don't remember how. I'll see what I can dig up now because I am curious. Using that for dictionaries would still be more difficult than just searching for something I think though.

*edit*

Doesn't Open book have some capabilities like that? I mean cant you turn a book into Daisy, plain text, plain audio, and HTML? And then after that, can't you tell it to mark the book up using certain arguements? "Split anything with chapter as heading, and this as so on and so forth."

Now I have to find that stupid disk to mes with it and find out. Thanks guys for giving me another thing to explore. Like  dont have enough questions I want answered!

the older pm can, in fact, read pdf files. there is a program for it, saw it on braille soft, I can't upgrade mine yet thanks to "even if you don't use that language you have to wait for us to get it done and force you to use it" thing, thank god I  can force a really hard reset on this I mean the one where you have to press a key or something can't remember what it was with the reset button, but for now I use my pm running 4.1.61, and it does its job in all I do ok, msn outside, typing at scool etc.

Does that PDFMate mark the document up too? I mean does it convert headings and all that? If not, then you dont need to worry about it, and it doesn't sound like anything special. Just check Wordwrap in notepad and tell Adobe to convert and save a text copy. That is what I do. No more software to install, no more crap to worry about taking up drive space.

*shrug* that is me though.

I am a avid reader and am losing my vision, when I heard about the Kindle I was thrilled, bc in a very short time I won't be able to read the books I have and tlaking books are so old and I fall asleep listening to them. Now I understand that the publishers of books I can buy for the reader can deny my ablility to use text to speak, bc of a conflict with their audio department.  So what can people like me do and where is the ADA in this battle?