Do It Myself Blog – Glenda Watson Hyatt » When Speech Impairment and Text-to-Speech Software Collide

Glenda Watson Hyatt shares her experiences living with cerebral palsy to motivate and inspire others to think about how they perceive their own situation and their own world around them. She does all this by typing with only her left thumb!

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When Speech Impairment and Text-to-Speech Software Collide

Filed under: Living with a disability — by Glenda at 11:19 am on Monday, April 6, 2009

Today I am busily working on my presentation entitled “How POUR is Your Blog” for SOBCon 09: Biz School for Bloggers. It is a long, tedious process.

One step in the process into convert my typed text into synthesized speech. I use the TextAloud software and the voice of Kate. For the most part, Kate is amazing – for a computerized voice.

But, there are times when I need to kate-ize the text. For example, for the past tense of “read”, I change the text to “red”. Recently I discovered “refreshable” needed to be “refrshble”; otherwise, Kate spoke it as “refreeshable”.

This morning Kate stumbled on “navigable”. With my speech impairment, I repeatedly said the word aloud, trying to determine the correct pronunciation. Kate just couldn’t get it!

I began laughing so hard at the ridiculousness of the situation that I couldn’t hear what Kate was saying anyway.

If Kate mangles a few words during my presentation, you’ll understand why.