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Comment by spaceprison | Hacker News Reader

My daughter is dyslexic and would love to play things like stardew valley, pokemon or even animal crossing but being text only makes them such a slog for her.

The same goes for sub titles, she'd be perfectly fine with a robot voice for the actors if they sounded real enough like this.

Game changer.

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Thank you for your comment. One of the reasons we founded Sonantic was to improve accessibility so we are right there with you! We plan to do this by reducing the barriers (both financial and logistical) of voiced content for everyone from indie developers to big AAA studios. We've already begun to see progress on this through partnership with initial customers during our beta.

Is your TTS process necessarily ahead of time, or can it be done at runtime with all the flexibility (templating, generative text etc) that brings?

That's the holy grail right there, isn't it? :) We're definitely working towards runtime but still some work to be done there to account for additional complexities and balance trade-offs re: speed, quality, accuracy etc. of the rendered output.

I have a print-related disability causing severe convergence insufficiency with my eyes, due to a rare neurological disease affecting my peripheral nervous system.

I generally use Kurzweil 3000 (http://KurzweilEdu.com) which is made by Kurzweil Educational Systems, as a screen reader. You should definitely considering partnering with them in particular, as it would be very strategic.

OT, but if you are looking/curious about programming environments for her, please check out BlockStudio [0]. It's a text-free visual programming language for children (ages 8-13).

[0] www.blockstud.io

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