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12.09.09
TTS With Orca
 By
Rodney Sellers
I have a friend who was blinded when he was young. To say the least, this has caused him a few accessibility problems with computers. Recently, he has been using the TTS (Text-to-Speech) feature in Vista.
It worked, but he complained that it kept crashing his computer. He did come research and found that Macs have the same feature and was excited, but didn't want to pay the high price for a Mac when he had a new PC. I told him I would look into it also and see what I could find out. I found many after market TTS applications for windows, but from their reviews, all seemed to have extensive issues and limitations. Then I ran across Orca.
"Orca is a free, open source scriptable screen reader. Using various combinations of speech, braille, and magnification, Orca helps provide access to applications and toolkits that support the AT-SPI (e.g., the GNOME desktop). The development of Orca has been led by the Accessibility Program Office of Sun Microsystems, Inc. with contributions from many community members. "
Orca seemed to be the solution to all of his problems, but the fact that he would have to change to a new OS was going to be a hard push. I told him about the Orca and he really liked it, but changing to Linux seemed to discourage him. I reminded him that if he changed to a Mac, he would be changing OS also and he warmed up to the idea. I installed Ubuntu for him and to my surprise, Orca was already pre-installed. I installed his braille board. It mostly worked, it just needed a few tweaks in the configuration. My friend wanted to see how easy it would be to configure, so I took him to the Audio Guides on the Orca site, and he configured it himself and has it up and running. He has been using it for a few months now and loves it. He is also very happy that it does not crash his system if he goes to a flash website. If you need TTS then don't be scared to give Linux and Orca a try. Like my friend, you will be pleasantly surprised.
About the Author:
Rodney Is A Staff Writter for iEntry.
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