Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon.
Happy to answer any questions.
Happy to answer any questions.
And how painful is reading emails? HTML email is notoriously limited compared to HTML (and CSS) in the browser, but it's pretty hard to add structure to a plain text email too. How annoying is it when I do so using e.g. a "line" made out of repeated dashes?
For a line of dashes like "-------", most screen readers can recognize repeating characters, so that string gets read for me as "7 dash". If using an <hr> element, then there is no ambiguity about what it means.
Might work for you too.
Edit: Also, do you MUD?
Then Empire Mud, but I left due to disagreements with the admin. I loved the concept but it didn't really have the playerbase to support it.
More recently, I was on Procedural Realms. But I was affected by 3 separate instances of data corruption / loss, the last of which resulted in an unplanned pwipe since there were no offsite backups and the drive on the server failed. Years of progress gone due to lack of backups, so I'm never going back.
Ever since, I've been trying to find something else. Perhaps I'm just getting older but I don't have the patience to grind that I once had, which rules out most hack and slash muds. These days, I prefer something with interesting quests, places to explore and mechanics.
What muds do you play?
Is reading the books required for enjoyment? I haven't read anything from the Discworld series.
There's also a newbie group chat where you can ask for help, the syntax is 'newbie' followed by your message. It'll go away once you get too many levels in your skills.
A drawback with Ankh-Morpork is that it has cops, they might interfere if you decide to attack something that isn't a rat or cockroach or somesuch, but if you get caught and put in jail you'll eventually be released. Getting killed is a bit worse, you either waste your experience points by getting a raise from an NPC, or send a message to a particular type of priest that can resurrect you.
The interesting part for me was that you can recognize synthetic voice much faster than human speech. Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS? Also, I think older voices sound more robotic that the newer ones (I mean pre AI, like the default on android is newer for me). Is there a difference for how fast you can listen to the newer more nicely sounding ones or the older more robotic ones?
Yes. The main requirements for the TTS I use is it must be intelligible at very high rates of speed and it must have no perceivable latency (i.e, how long it takes to convert a string of text to audio). This rules out use of almost all voices, since a lot of them are focused on sounding as human as possible, which comes at the expense of being intelligible at high rates. The newer voices also usually don't have low latency.
> Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS?
I'm using ETI Eloquence. If I switched to another voice capable of being intelligible at ESpeak, I would have to slow down because I'm not used to it and have to train myself to get back to the speeds I'm used to.
The use case for super high speed TTS are pretty niche though.
I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?
Sounds like the robotic voice is more important than we give it credit for, though - from the article's "Do You Really Understand What It’s Saying?" section:
> Unlike human speech, a screen reader’s synthetic voice reads a word in the same way every time. This makes it possible to get used to how it speaks. With years of practice, comprehension becomes automatic. This is just like learning a new language.
When I listened to the voice sample in that section of the article, it sounds very choppy and almost like every phoneme isn't captured. Now, maybe they (the phonemes) are all captured, or maybe they actually aren't - but the fact that the sound per word is _exactly_ the same, every time, possibly means that each sound is a precise substitute for the 'full' or 'slow' word, meaning that any introduced variation from a "natural" voice could actually make the 8x speech unintelligible.
Hope the author can shed a bit of light, it's so neat! I remember ~20 years ago the Sidekick (or a similar phone) seemed to be popular in blind communities because it also had settings to significantly speed up TTS, which someone let me listen to once, and it sounded just as foreign as the recording in TFA.
I guess sounding "natural" really just amounts to adding variation across the sentence, which destroys phoneme-level accuracy.
Every syllable is being captured, just speed up so that the pauses between them are much smaller than usual.