Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Feb 11, 2010, at 2:23 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Now of course it's complicated by eyesight.
>
> Do you do text-voice recognition? I installed a reader on my "blog"
> that actually sounds pretty good. It was your complaint about not
> being able to read blogs that made me do it. The Mac comes with a
> built-in text reader - dunno about Windows, but I'm sure it's no big
> deal. No interest in trying that?
>
We have several text-reading programs or gadgets; but they involve some switching around of computers in the house, and Jan (thehousehold tech geek) has been overloaded. Moreover, mastering them puts stress on the learning curve of a 79-year old brain! But were getting closer on all fronts, & I think before my eyes fail so I can't even type this I'll be able to have text read and my voice turned into text. One difficult is that I can't read the manuals! There are work-arounds for that, but, as I said, it all gets complicated.
Currently I'm working to master a pretty impressive gadget called the Victor Reading Stream. It's got some hundred gigs of memory, for books, music, dictation, recording of meetings or whatever, and turning of text into speech. There is a hube library of recorded books, much of it free for the legally blind or blind. We've just bought another gadget that scans books with amazing speed, and it also will reead them to you. Its 'voices' are not vry good, but may improve with the listener'sexperience of them. In any case, its scanning powers are quite remarkable and we have other ways to get them turned into speech.
So we will see.
Incidentally, except for a couple years in the '80s, the main symptom of my depression have never been what I call 'plain vanilla depression" but rather a really seriusly pathological procrastination. (And I am tempted to violence when someone says, "Oh I have that trouble too" -- they don'. That is slowing up everything.
Carrol