Mudlet and TTS/ Speech readers?

[Nyyrazzilyss]

Recently, a newbie logged into the mud I play who is visually impaired/using a speechreader.

I've no experience with this at all, either speech with mudlet or any other TTS software on windows. I am thinking however that I should take a look into it, and change my script accordingly to be able to function with it.

Is there any type of faq around about getting mudlet to work with a speech reader? Are there any internal commands I can/should call from lua for tts, or is it all 3rd party software?

[SlySven]

It is before my time but I think Heiko looked into this in the past and had a special version - I'm not sure if a search here will produce anything meaningful but I can say that there is not anything specifically in the code that I can see. A GUI may not be the optimum application environment for this anyhow - but I guess it would depend on the level of impairment of the user and what they are familiar with.

[Nyyrazzilyss]

A GUI may not be the optimum application environment for this anyhow - but I guess it would depend on the level of impairment of the user and what they are familiar with.

To be honest, i'd never even considered visually impaired using/playing a text mud in the first place. That i've build a GUI overtop of the text could potentially make it a bit easier, mostly because i've created a lot of buttons that have full scripts with multiple actions/triggers tied to them, though I will still need to make changes to accommodate.

Partially where i'm even considering it is i've spent the past couple months improving the functionality of my mapper with the new core. It made a lot of things reasonably possible to implement in my script, and I hadn't done alot with gaining sound again at the same time other then adding a beep or two. I really should add a lot more sounds, and if i'm going to start on that doing so such that visually impared are also able to use it wouldn't be the worst idea.

I'm probably worse at that then I am at artwork, however Creating appropriate distinct sounds for png icons would be a bit difficult for me, though I could generate/capture .wav files with a voice saying the icon names and just have that played when icons are entered. What would be much easier would be just a lua function like 'say("this is a message")' that called the system's TTS function. I guess i'd hoped something like that had already been done, if not i'll take a look into the feasibility of it / existing innate TTS support on operating systems.

[SlySven]

I pulled this topic out of the search box: http://forums.mudlet.org/viewtopic.php? ... 236#p14236 which was the one I think I was referring to.

[Nyyrazzilyss]

Thanks, I hadn't seen that thread previously and just read through it. Keeping in mind i'm not familiar with / have never used JAWS, NVDA, etc (and all the other packages refered to in that thread), it appears that it was an abandoned attempt to make mudlet in general work with screen readers.

While that might be a desired end goal, I think i'm more looking for something that will allow me (as a sighted person) to change my script myself to accomodate non-sighted. I'll try the various packages mentioned in the thread / review what the current state of development is with google + microsoft, etc TTS packages, as to how difficult it would be to just implement a basic say() command. Part of that being the mud I play, at least, has way to much of a flood of text for a screenreader to reasonably read all of it. I'm need to go through the potential text received and choose which should be read/summarize it.

I've no idea how non-sighted manage realtime text games in the first place.

[SlySven]

I've no idea how non-sighted manage realtime text games in the first place.

Me neither - and given that sight-loss is a known possibility for myself (Type 1 Diabetes) I ought to find out...!

[dicene]

Coming from Imperian, we have many players that are sight-impaired. Hell, our single greatest combatant plays using nothing but a screen reader for feedback. He uses MUSH however, because he is partial to Python, and partly because (from what I understand) Mudlet isn't as friendly on screenreaders as MUSH. I think maybe one of the biggest things is that he can do all his coding through script files that he can edit in an editor of his choice.

I've had two other people I was close to that played the same MUD through screenreaders, neither of which found Mudlet to their liking. One used VIPMud(which is specially designed for screenreaders, but is extremely sparse in functionality) and manuals almost everything. The other uses MUSH as well.

As far as what would be needed to make Mudlet more screenreader friendly, I think the biggest positive thing I found when I tested VIPMud a little myself was that as the new lines from the MUD were coming in, you could easily skip lines by hitting a specific button that moved to the next line, and scrolling up and down through the scrollback at old lines was as simple as using the arrow keys. The menus were also all put together in a manner where they would be navigable with nothing but the keyboard, which IMO would be a fantastic feature for people with their vision intact as well.

[Nyyrazzilyss]

The actual gui part is another story, however, I just glanced at QtSpeech / QTextToSpeech. I should be able to fairly easily link that it / add a lua interface (that would be entirely script dependent) of a 'say' function

[dicene]

Tried that before. I was having a hard time getting compiled scripts to find QtSpeech or QTextToSpeech at all. The #include <QtSpeech> part was failing. If I can find where I was having this problem again, I'll post the actual error message, but I think what I took away from it was that QtSpeech wasn't completely available in the most recent stable QT releases or something?

[SlySven]

QTextToSpeech seems to be a Qt5.9 feature according to my DuckDuckGo-fu (unlike Google they don't track and filter your search history!) Currently Qt5.6/5.7 seems to be what is available in the field so I think you are talking about something that is only an alpha feature at this time...