Arkinstone, the original developers of the Open Book program, developed what they called the Speech Synthesizer Interface Language (SSIL) to deal with the different command sets for various synthesizers. One difference, for example, is that one synthesizer may have 10 levels for speed while another may have 15 levels for speed. I'm not certain, but I believe that their SSIL was released into the public domain. You might investigate that avenue. hth Bob ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andreas Stefik" <stefika@xxxxxxxxx> To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, December 09, 2009 9:26 AM Subject: A question on Screen Reader Speed Standards Hi folks, I'm working right now on trying to build up our cross platform speech engines for the Sappy project and am trying, specifically, to get NetBeans to store custom preferences related to screen reader speed. On Mac, we basically just pass a flag to the TTS engine with a number, which, I suspect, is words per minute, although I'm not completely sure. On PC, things appear to be quite different and I'm not sure about all of the open source, and other, solutions out there (insert your favorite technology here). My question is, what would people suggest for standardizing the numbers for speed of reading we use for screen readers across all platforms? For example, does each screen reader everywhere measure speed in a different way? Should just put everything in words per minute and not worry about it, translating any screen reader that doesn't comply through some kind of calculation (if possible?)? Should we just standardize through some arbitrary metric, like 0 is the slowest and 1 is the fastest, then test everywhere to make sure those settings are "reasonable" and that the user's system preferences are not disturbed? To be clear, remember that our tool has to, ultimately, be compatible with every kind of screen reader, and should still work for the blind even if no screen reader is present (or if the screen reader doesn't work well at all). That's why I am asking, Thoughts are welcome, Stefik __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind