Newsgroups: comp.speech
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From: ebohlman@netcom.com (Eric Bohlman)
Subject: Re: Text to speech synthesis for blind attorney
Message-ID: <ebohlmanD1C4o8.23E@netcom.com>
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Date: Sat, 24 Dec 1994 21:50:32 GMT
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Howard A. Lax (ag109@detroit.freenet.org) wrote:

: My wife is a blind attorney.  She now uses Artic Vision Versio
: n
: 2.2 for speech synthesis with Word Perfect.  Eventually she will
: have to live in a Windows environemnt.  What is the best 
: speech synthesis system for a blind person made today?  Is there
: a good system that will run on a commercial sound board instead
: of a proprietary board?  Thanks for your help.

Since she currently uses Artic equipment, probably the first thing to 
look at would be Artic's WinVision.  The recently-released OutSpoken for 
Windows from Berkeley Systems has also gotten good reviews from a lot of 
users.  There's also Window Bridge from Synthvoice, which was the first 
Windows screen reader; it got off to somewhat of a rocky start, but is 
apparently a lot more stable now.  There's also Protalk from Biolink, 
which can use sound cards, but is somewhat more expensive than the 
others.  Henter-Joyce, Microtalk and GW Micro are working on products 
which are expected to be released early in 1995.

I don't believe there's such a thing as the "best" screen reader, voice 
synthesizer, or combination of the two.  It depends on the user and what 
the user is doing.

