jAWS PROBLEMS WITH REALSPEAK
- From: "john coley" <johncoley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 18:46:46 +0100
hI EVERYBODY, AS i SAID IN MY LAST POST i HAVE BEEN USING dANIEL, ONE OF THE
REALSPEAK VOICES FOR SIX MONTHS NOW. aLTHOUGH THE VOICE IS VERY CLEAR, AS
ANYONE WHO'S LISTENED TO THE jAWS 8.0 PRESENTATION CAN HEAR, BUT THERE WERE
PROBLEMS WITH REGARD TO CAPITALIZATION, PUNCTUATION AND THE INAPPROPRIATE
EXPANSION OF WORDS OR PARTS OF WORDS THE SPEECH ENGINE SAW AS ABBREVIATIONS.
i REPORTED THE PROBLEMS TO fs, WHO EVENTUALLY ESCALATED THE ISSUE TO THEIR
TEST TEAM. tHEY SAID THE PROBLEMS WERE ALL DUE TO THE REALSPEAK SPEECH ENGINE.
i HAVE PASTED HERE FOR ANYONE WHO'S INTERESTED THE TEXT OF MY ORIGINAL EMAIL
THE fs REGARDING THE PROBLEMS.
jOHN.
Hi. I recently bought the Realspeak Daniel voice. It is, without exception the
best synthesized voice I've ever heard. There are just a couple of small
issues, which hopefully you'll be able to help me with.
I am using Daniel with Jaws 5.1 professional.
The first problem is that of capitalisation. No matter how I set
Jaws there is now no indication of case at all.
Does this preclude its use in any environments in which case sensitivity is
an issue, or is there a way I can adjust it?
I find that its not seeing capitals, which start a sentence has the effect of
the text being read as if there were no capitals or full stops. Pauses come
at the end of the line, not sentence.
It wouldn't seem to be able to see punctuation marks.
As it can't see apostrophes "I'll" is read as "I lines", "I'd" as I d, "we've"
as we ve etc. Its not seeing full stops is, if anything a worse problem.
Besides the effect it has on the structured reading of a document full stops
within
words or between numbers, so 3.6 ghz is read as 3 6 Ghz.
The second problem is that of abbreviations. Some examples of this problem
are:
"psp" is read as Philippines pesos points, "st", which is sometimes read as
"saint", sometimes as "street", and other
times in unabbreviated form. This even happpens when the st is preceeded by a
number, as in a date.
This also happens with "rd", read as road, the file extention MPG read as
miles per gallon, M on some occasions being read as "metre" These are just a
few examples.
I have both Expand Abbreviations and Expand Acronyms turned off.
I have tried to correct the problem of the inappropriate abbreviations in the
Jaws dictionary manager, but with limited success. I understand from my
Jaws supplier's tech support that that won't remedy the problem when reading a
document normally, but only when reading by character or word. Apparently
they have had similar problems themselves due to this inappropriate and
unwelcome abbreviation.
As it is a third party voice, and not one provided by Freedom Scientific I
am unclear as to whether Jaws is solely responsible for the problem, or if
the voice has a dictionary built into it.
Is there a way I can correct these things?
I hope you can help,
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