Jamie and others taking part in this project, I feel as you do that it is
very important that we all take the time and trouble to listen to all the
twenty books and complete the questionnaire as fully as possible. This is a
wonderful opportunity to have our opinions listened to by the people
responsible for providing the means of accessing the printed word. I
understand your point Jamie regarding the need to keep the cost down in
preparatory work on the text but I still feel that quite a lot of
improvements could be carried out with a simple text editor. You are quite
right of course that if any of these voices was the only means of accessing
important print material we would be rather stupid not to avail ourselves of
it. We are however discussing the way ahead for blind people to enjoy the
pleasures of reading and not having to put up with a second rate compromise.
Please give this pilot scheme a chance to bring about improvements for us
all by completing it and giving your honest and well considered opinions.
Best wishes Bob Gould
Iain,
I can't make a categorical statement here as I have only started listening to the CDs but I know for a fact that whilst Jaws is generally pretty good with the Eloquence synthesizer, it is certainly not perfect and I'm sure that you would find the kind of problems that Bob mentioned in his message if you tried to use it without modifying the original text or customising the synthesizer.
I also believe that the Rhetorical voices may have been used on some of the CDs. If this is the case, in my own opinion, this voice is superior in quality to Eloquence so we can agree to disagree on this point. It does, however, cost a heck of a lot of dosh so may not be financially viable to some producers!
However, my main point was that people have to feed all this comment back to NLB and Dolphin because without this feedback nothing will change. For example, if you look beyond the quality of the synthesized speech, what did you think about the ability to navigate quickly through the text? Did you like the ability to search for text within the book - not all DAISY books will let you do this and only those with the complete text of the book will have this functionality. Does this kind of feature mean that you would prefer to use a software DAISY reader rather than a hardware player which can't search for text?
If the only thing that you really don't like is the quality of the speech, there are ways round this even if they would take longer to produce e.g. good old human speech. However, NLB really needs to know that that's how you feel so I would encourage those of you who are reluctant to complete the questionnaires to reconsider your reasons for this.
Cheers for now,
Jamie
----- Original Message ----- From: "Iain Lackie" <ilackie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <jaws-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 12:02 AM
Subject: [jaws-uk] Re: Daisy Book project
Jamie,
I think the point here with regard to the voice on the DAISY books is that what we hear by default with JAWS (i.e. Eloquence) is simply streets ahead of anything on these CD's.
Iain.
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