NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/misc/handicap/5769

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-12 | 2.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!isc-br!bunker!hcap!hnews!277!101!Steve.Richards
From: [e-mail] (Steve Richards)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Accent Dictionary.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 12 Aug 92 19:08:41 GMT
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Organization: FidoNet node 1:277/101 - House Of Pancakes, Morgantown WV
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X-Fidonet: Blink Talk Conference

Index Number: 23770

[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]

Hi Don, I decided not to quote your message, but here goes with the
answers.  I copied your address, and since I had already promised a copy
if you were interested in the dictionary I'll mail it to you as soon as
you let me know if a 360K 5.25-inch floppy would be ok.  That's the only
size I have to spare, and few of those, until a newly ordered batch of
disks arrives.  You asked about my phone number.  It is [phone]
but I only answer this number from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Eastern time
weekdays, since I'm the only one to man the phone and I spend much of my
time working with my writing career.  Since I must visit the post
office, bank, etc, I can't always be here during those hours either, but
I usually am.

RE your question about writing a program to cause radio station call
letters to be spoken as characters...  Well, it wouldn't be impossible,
but there are problems.  Perhaps the biggest is that most of the
stations in the East have call letter sequences starting with the letter
W, and there's an awful lot of four-letter words that begin with that
letter.  Those starting with K wouldn't be so bad, but C would be as bad
as W, or worse.  There's a simple solution, at least from a programming
standpoint.  Provide an option with all screen readers that
automatically spell any character strings in all caps, but 1: how would
one convince all screen reader producers to do this, and 2: it ain't
really a good idea since normal text might sometimes be written in all
caps for emphasis.  Still, with the option defeatable it isn't a
horrible notion.  An independent program doing this wouldn't be worth
it, in my opinion.  You would necessarily have to preempt the screen
reader's screening of characters written via the BIOS, or worse the data
written directly to the video RAM, or else intercept the character
strings sent from the screen reader to the synthesizer which may have
had their case altered and might contain character sequences specific to
a certain synthesizer.  Anyone going to all that trouble might as well
write a screen reading program.  I'm exaggerating a bit there, but it
would be a fair amount of work, and any program that would slow the
processing of speech output and cause potential conflicts with the
speech software if not written just right...  Well, you get the idea.
Steve R.

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