#text to speech

[whumpacabra]

Writing Accessibility PSA

Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!

Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?

A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.

Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!

I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]

[autisticdreamdrop]

yes yes the answer is yes! we are a mid-high support needs disabled autistic polyfragmented DID system with alters with a wide range of vebralness. a lot of us use forms of AACs or TTS in out of inner world / headspace and in real life. if you think you need it, just use it. it's stressful at first, but nonverbal communication is communication and it's a valid way to communicate. 🧩 - The Dreamdrop System

[sag-dab-sar]

Monetizing Accessibility

I wrote a review awhile ago for an app that I heavily relied on due to my dyslexia and TBI— Speechify. Its a text-to-speech reader that I can take photos of text books or signs and have them read to me. I used it plenty. You can take as many photos as you want, upload them, and have it read to you. Well..... thats what you used to be able to do. Then I updated the app and tah dah the main feature is behind a paywall!!! I can upload 3 files (photo/photoset) only! And if I want more I have to pay THIS fucking much:

So I updated my app review from 5 stars to 1

Then a long time later I got this email:

"One time discount" on something that was fucking free. Its the most basic feature. There were plenty of additional features to pay for and ads prior. Now the ENTIER goddamn app, including the absolute most basic function, above 3 files is behind a $140 paywall. I don't want 90% of the features just keeping files like I could before. Its not even a one time fee; its a subscription. As if my TBI and dyslexia only lasts a year. Not to mention I already deleted my entire library.

I fucking hate how goddamn expensive being disabled it is. The email is an insult.

[dreamdropsystem]

AACs are important for autistics that deal with communication issues. When your mouth parts don't work (verbal loss/ nonspeaking, semispeaking, selectively mute etc) or hell, you don't want to use verbal communication. And that's valid too.

There are plenty of auties that use both verbal and nonverbal communication. There are plenty of auties that prefer nonverbal communication. And that's okay.

we have semiverbal/speaking and nonverbal/speaking alters, alters who have verbal loss. a little too a lot.

in our life we've been forced to be verbal and that's not okay. our system is full of AAC users.

This is our oc Moon (which we wanna change their name) they're an AAC user and uses a wide range of nonverbal communication: communication cards, a tablet with an AAC app, written communication, printed out communication board, and TTS (text to speech). we project oh them. we mainly use text to speech and AAC apps - Honeylily

please remember it's okay to use AACs

[elasmobranch-enthusiast]

i just wanted to let everyone know about this very simple, free, text to speech aac app. it’s called simple aac.

it’s just text to speech, no buttons or symbols. i know that won’t work for everyone, but hopefully someone finds it useful. i know i appreciate having an aac app on my phone that gives me a reliable way to communicate without having to bring my heavy ipad with me at all times. there’s even a little sentence about trans rights, which i know a lot of us appreciate 🏳️‍⚧️

hope this can help someone!

edit: i don’t know if this is for androids, i use ios

[selectivechaos]

just because my aac device is a phone, doesn't mean it is any less crucial that i have it with me.

just because you understand what it is like to have your phone die. and understand that you've lost access to important text and call communication, as well as photos, bank stuff, social media etc, does NOT mean you get to say you know what it's like when my phone dies.

yeah, your phone has emotional and functional significance to you,

🌹but this is my fucking voice.

“glued to his phone” “so much screen time” "get off your phone and have a real conversation for once"

🌹this is my voice.

[autismcultureis]

Autism culture is letting self use text-to-speech on phone for accessibility and wondering why you didn't just do this earlier

.

[soft-cookie-aka-aquadrop]

This is the funniest thing

I was copy-pasting axolotl facts into the Microsoft Sam TTS generator for fun, and I found out that in order to get Kinito's voice (Adult Male #3) to pronounce "axolotl" correctly, you have to spell it as "axolottle". 😆

[haleslugworth]

The savage son is outraged lmao.

[chaos-cousins]

Sligoogle how to impress new possible thief friend without overwhelming them

[schar-aac]

"test-to-speech"

Image: A keyboard with a speech bubble coming from it with lines, representing words, on it.

[petrichoremojis]

TTS/Text to speech user or someone using TTS please?

[ID: A drawing of a grey keyboard, with a red arrow pointing from it to a speech bubble. End ID]

[ID: A drawing of a yellow person holding a keyboard. A red arrow points from their keyboard to a speech bubble above them. End ID]

Text-to-speech and TTS user.

[autisticdreamdrop]

goals!! AAC + TTS user friendship

credit: Drawn To AAC

[sicksadstar]

this user wants to use their AACs more

[dreamdropsystem]

we love you AAC users. we love you part time AAC users. we love you full time AAC users. we love you TTS users. we love you part time TTS users. we love you full time TTS users.

[sandinthepipes]

Hello fellow dyslexic/adhd/others who would like to enjoy fanfics through their ears, I just spent the entire day testing android apps to find one that doesn’t suck as much.

TL;DR - these two T2S, Audify

I feel like I need to share this because 90% the apps don’t even allow a web page as a source, let alone get past the log in page, and I cant be the only one who doesn’t want to download every single fic.

“Oh, but doesn’t android have a built-in text-to-speech function in the accessibility settings?” I hear you ask. Yes, but it sucks ass very badly. Firstly it only reads in the system language, so it doesn’t really work. Second, you need to highlight all that you want it to read, and seeing that I read a minimum of 15k words in a sitting, I’m not gonna do that.

Also I’m broke, I imagine you are too, but even if I wasn’t I’m not paying for this, if I did I wouldn’t even be supporting a human being, so no.

I’ll immediately break your trust with the first point, but it’s what I’ve been doing until now, and now that I know what the android mobile experience is like, I feel the need to include this. The best solution I’ve had so far (which works wonders, let me tell you) is letting Siri read them on the iPad. It’s only doable when I’m at home and it’s still an apple product, so that’s why I began the research. However the positive points are INCREDIBLE so I’m going to ads it to the list because I said so.

First of all it’s built-in and SO EASY to access, you literally just swipe with two fingers and it stars to read. It reads the punctuation, you might think that’s a given and so did I, but no. A question sounds like a question, an exclamation point does why its supposed to do, short sentences sound what they’re supposed to sound like. In apparently all the apps ever created, you won’t find any of it, just flat, monotone voices with flat little pauses. Overall excellent experience 10/10.

Cons: it’s on apple, I consider apple the same as Disney, I would love to not give them more money so that they can make the market increasingly worse. Every now and then a system update will fuck with the tts function and it will be unusable for a while. Sometimes it doesn’t like the text format on some fics. It’s not portable.

Now that we got that out of the way let us get to the meet.

Speechify - it sucks bad. At least the free version, but seen as it costs almost 10€ a month I’m not even going to consider the premium version. Fuck that. You can’t increase the speed, and as somebody who hasn’t watched a single YouTube video on normal speed since they added the function I can’t do that, too slow, I forgot what we were talking about once we get to the end of the sentence. Also you can only use those weird very robotic voices, and they’re not even that many. Don’t recommend. I felt like I had to include it since it was one of the few who allowed browser navigation and well, it’s speechify. Also you can’t t have saved more than 3 “files” per time. Doesn’t have sleep mode.

T2S - cute. It works. Again, no emotions, but it reads what it has to, nice voice selections, easy to use. The premium version adds literally nothing, they’re a good app, what they have, they give. Also you can customise the interface colour if you want. Has the sleep mode.

Audify - works exactly the same as T2S, but it saves the history and has a bit more customisation for how it reads and what it reads (which you don’t really need for ao3, but if you wanted to read, say, Wikipedia with all the notes and stuff, now you know). Has the sleep mode.

That’s all folks. Now go and be free of your reading impediment, or be free in your multitasking, or whatever you want to do. I’m done, I’ve given my datas to all kinds of shady apps, I need to go do damage control