Andreas, I have no clue what jaws rates its speech rate on, especially since it changes as you use the radio button to change it, flipping between two slightly different numbers that make no sense to me what so ever. my thoughts, yes make it a standardized method, and use the more universal WPM rating, at least that one makes sense! good luck, elf proprietor, The Grab Bag, for blind computer users and programmers http://grabbag.alacorncomputer.com Owner: Alacorn Computer Enterprises "own the might and majesty of a Alacorn!" www.alacorncomputer.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Andreas Stefik 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