completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those. keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
First interesting learning in my journey of giving up eloquence: on IOS and Mac, the voice presets for the new Siri voices really, really matter. I have two versions of the same voice in my added voices, one for high speed and one for narration. Default is bad for everything, but the fast preset is quite nice for everything but reading long passages. For long passages it's jerky and unpleasant. But strangely setting narration and then speeding it up to the same rate sounds much better.
Second learning: Espeak on IOS is apparently abandoned. RHVoice hasn't had a release in a year. Vocalizer is the only choice if I want cross-platform voices. I'm just not sure if the advantage of getting used to a single voice is worth the horrible pain of that muddy Vocalizer sound.
@matt It's also possible that something in the Eloquence DLL files isn't emulating correctly, and my understanding could be wrong. But either way, eloquence doesn't run on an ARM Virtual Machine, Windows Emulation or not. Maybe Windows only emulates 64-bit not 32-bit X86? No idea.
@matt It's still X86 32-bit on X86/X64. But my understanding was that running on the Surface RT laptops and getting listed in the Microsoft Store required them to switch over to ARM Python, because the early RT laptops that only ran Windows Store apps didn't support emulation.
@matt Because NVDA is native ARM. So the Addon can't load the eloquence DLL files. I've tried it on an ARM virtual machine on mac. No go. I guess they'd have to do some kind of RPC the way the Sonata neural voices handle it.
@matt I love eloquence, and depend on it for my productivity. But now that codefactory eloquence is abandoned, I won't be able to use it with the next NVDA Update. And there is no way work is approving IBMTTS or Threshhold or any of the other hacky solutions. There's also talk of moving us to ARM laptops, where even those solutions won't run. So I have to start trying to move away while I can still take it slow.
@modulux Not sure yet. Looking into espeak, but it sucks on iOS. Maybe rh voice? I hate how muddy vocalizer sounds so not that. Maybe I give up on having the same voice on all platforms? I’m open to ideas!
@modulux Because I want to do it on my own time. Rather than be forced to do it when NVDA goes 64 bit. Or work converts us to arm laptops where eloquence won’t run.
@mojoaxel I hope you're right! But I thought I'd broken the cable that connects the midplate to the mainboard, and I looked at getting a replacement. It was $20 before shipping. Lucky for me, I hadn't; that cable is extremely fussy about alignment (or there's some visual indicator I couldn't see), and the ninth time I reconnected it everything worked. However, it doesn't cost them $20 to make a ribbon cable. Probably they'll just keep making parts more and more expensive, until it would be cheaper to get a new laptop than to fix the old one.
Also, I could replace the motherboard! Or 3D print my own third-party components! But...yeah. I'm never gonna do that. But I could! At any time! And that's all that matters.
I think I feel the same way about laptops that sighted people who drive must feel about giant off-road capable SUVs. At any time, they could drive through the wilderness! Not that they ever will. Similarly, at any time, I could compile giant rust applications on this laptop! Or run important mathematical calculations! But I never will. And the same way it's impossible to park an SUV, the Framework 16 laptop is impossible to actually, you know, use on your lap. If I could see and drive, would I have some kind of Chevy Tahoe that can tow fifty tons and takes up two zipcodes just to drive me to work? Now I feel sad.
@stirlock The fix should be easy. But eventually, NVDA will be forced to go 64-bit, and that will break eloquence forever. My guess would be probably 2027.
@Tamasg Also sounds like it's bugs in the DLL, or bugs in the way Windows 11 is running the ancient code from 1995, and not something you can fix. Maybe grab an old copy of NVDA and see what it does on Windows XP?
