Axistive article on Talking Books

Nice article at
http://www.axistive.com/a-new-read-on-digital-talking-books.html

Today, digital hardware, synthetic speech software, and powerful standards for digital talking books (DTBs) have dramatically enhanced the accessibility of print-originated material. Many DTB titles, including fiction, non-fiction, and textbooks, are available through nonprofit organizations such as Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic and Benetech Bookshare.org. Serving plate-sized, long-playing records and bulky phonographs have been replaced by CD and solid-state memory media and players for talking books.

The content of many books, articles, and manuals is available as electronic text, enabling text-to-speech (TTS) software to read out the material on PCs. Works only available in print may be converted to electronic text using scanners with optical character recognition.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine, developed in the 1980s, allows virtually any printed text to be digitized and read out on a PC with TTS software. Screen reading interface software for PCs using TTS is widely available. A USB memory module offers TTS access to screen content that can plug into any PC.

The first widely available commercial synthetic speech was DECtalk, developed at MIT in the 1970s. Although it is still preferred by many visually disabled individuals for its high-speed speaking capability, a number of high-quality concatenative TTS engines, like AT&T’s Natural Voice, are now available for screen readers. These systems piece together segments of human recorded speech. TTS systems for multiple languages with different voices have been developed for a variety of computing platforms. Much More...