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Comment by liability | Hacker News Reader

The demise of TTS was truly unfortunate. I got a 'Kindle Paperwhite' a few years back but I still primarily use my 'Kindle Keyboard' because it has TTS and the paperwhite doesn't.

From what I understand, the publishing industry is to blame, thanks to their fear of cannibalizing audiobook sales. I will never forgive them for this.

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Why assume everyone knows an acronym instead of spending the extra 1000ms to type it out once for us?

Text-to-speech.

Sorry, I assumed people here were familiar with accessibility tech. (If I recall correctly, the marketing material for Kindles used to use the term 'TTS', I don't think it's that obscure.)

I had just realized it must've been the tenth time I've had to google an acronym on HN over the last couple days. You're probably right that it's fair jargon in the context of e-readers. It's just that context is constantly changing as you click between HN comments. I might just be in a sassy mood. :P

Even if we know the acronym, it is easier to read the full words.

Think of it as an accessibility issue. Full words are more accessible.

I'm going to have to call you out on this. You can't criticize a person for not taking the time to type out text-to-speech and then yourself use "1000ms" - because if I Google "1000ms" it returns 2236.94 Miles per hour!

That's just a bug in Google, pretending "ms" is actually "m/s".

If TTS is fair game in the context of e-readers, ms is fair game... literally everywhere.

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