> Though you can also get trapped in a fractal of polish-chasing
I think this applies to anything :)
> You quickly realize the behavior you see is an idiosyncrasy in the screen reader itself.
Yeah this is definitely a pain point during development. There is standardization and efforts to reduce these differences though, so I hope this gets better over time.
> Is there a difference for how fast you can listen to the newer more nicely sounding ones or the older more robotic ones?
Yes. The main requirements for the TTS I use is it must be intelligible at very high rates of speed and it must have no perceivable latency (i.e, how long it takes to convert a string of text to audio). This rules out use of almost all voices, since a lot of them are focused on sounding as human as possible, which comes at the expense of being intelligible at high rates. The newer voices also usually don't have low latency.
> Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS?
I'm using ETI Eloquence. If I switched to another voice capable of being intelligible at ESpeak, I would have to slow down because I'm not used to it and have to train myself to get back to the speeds I'm used to.
> If you're used to 800 wpm bursts, I'd Assume normal speaking pace will feel slow any way you cut it
Edit: if you're referring to videos or podcast then yes, assuming the objective is to get information as quickly as possible.
Actually that isn't really the case. That might happen if you're asking someone to read something to you for an extended period of time, but that's not how normal conversations happen.
> On a slightly related note, have you felt this affecting your speech patterns?
Oh yes. It was one of my formative childhood experiences. My first mud was Alter Aeon, but I haven't played in almost 10 years. I enjoyed myself during the 5 years or so that I played and got to know a lot of people. The first first thing I ever programmed was a bot to automatically heal group members.
Then Empire Mud, but I left due to disagreements with the admin. I loved the concept but it didn't really have the playerbase to support it.
More recently, I was on Procedural Realms. But I was affected by 3 separate instances of data corruption / loss, the last of which resulted in an unplanned pwipe since there were no offsite backups and the drive on the server failed. Years of progress gone due to lack of backups, so I'm never going back.
Ever since, I've been trying to find something else. Perhaps I'm just getting older but I don't have the patience to grind that I once had, which rules out most hack and slash muds. These days, I prefer something with interesting quests, places to explore and mechanics.
Yeah, the options for this are quite limited. The only ones I know of are Espeak (open source) but doesn't sound as good, and Eloquence, which is an abandoned product.
The use case for super high speed TTS are pretty niche though.
Oh boy, don't get me started on emails. HTML emails are such a pain because of the hacks needed to get it to render properly across multiple devices. So I hear a lot of information about the tables being used for layout purposes, which is a pain because the tables are not semantically meaningful at all. And then there are emails that just have one or more images.
For a line of dashes like "-------", most screen readers can recognize repeating characters, so that string gets read for me as "7 dash". If using an <hr> element, then there is no ambiguity about what it means.
Yes, that is how I usually consume my content. Cognitive load is actually lower for unstructured prose compared to code, think about fiction for example. Code is much denser.
When I read to relax, it is for enjoyment, so I don't aim to read as fast as possible. This is why I still listen to human narrated audiobooks, since a good narrator adds to the experience.
I was referring to how synthetic speech always talk in exactly the same way down to inflection and pauses whenever it encounters the same phrase, which isn't how people talk. So this helps a lot with comprehension. Structure of the content does help as well.
Yup, it does. I was an early adopter of VS Code. It has been extremely satisfying seeing the progress they've made with accessibility. I provide feedback on a semi-frequent basis. Nowadays its only to flag regressions.