Accessibility question: TTS and ligatures

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

Thanks a lot for all the testing. Much appreciated!

You're welcome I'd been meaning to get around to re-testing everything anyway.

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

(...) and in the hope that people who really depend on accessibility will have access to the more advanced apps that Tex mentioned.

Not necessarily. (Sorry, I've seen this thread only now.) For a blind user, accessibility of an app, how well it interacts with their screen reader and how used they are to it, will often be more important than some additional features. Also, it is more difficult for them to try out different apps, or use several ones alternatively, according to what particular features they offer. And, there are specialized hand-held TTS devices, like the Victor Stream, that are optimized for usability, have their TTS engines built in, but are not that good at advanced TTS tasks.

I had a blind friend, who, sadly, has died last year, who knew a lot about computers. For years we've tried to come up with ways to make even simple things like italics (emphasized) work across even a few selected apps, voices and devices, and never got anywhere. With all the progress in voice synths and markup tags since the days of MS-DOS, the only reliable way to have italics was still to use underscore characters, and have them spoken. (Which, BTW, bothered her less than it bothered me.)

In other words, yes, two separate versions will certainly be best. Don't expect too much, though, for what you can achieve, now or in the foreseeable future, with a TTS-optimized version ...