Text to Voice for the Vision Impaired

[mervhd]

Hello FG Forums,

A friend of mine has some vision issues and a reading disability. He began playing with us and was asking if there is a way to use Mac's built-in text to speech program. I tried to mess with it a little bit but I have not been able to get it to work. I assume that's because when you copy and past in FG it does not export to a clipboard but keeps the copy internal. I can only assume that is to prevent copying FG's products. Does anyone know of a program that works or a possible workaround for this issue?

Thanks in advance!
MERVHD

[Zacchaeus]

Hi mervhd welcome to FG.

This has come up a couple of times and I think it depends on the level of disability. A player can adjust the scale of their client to make everything a lot bigger and there are a couple of hi contrast themes around but that depends on the ruleset.

One thing that likely won’t work is the text to speech software since the software won’t be able to access the text in FG.

[mervhd]

That's what I figured. I just discovered the /scaleui command and will send that to him to see what if that works for him. Less room for maps and such but he can probably scale it back down when it is game time.

[Talyn]

There are at least three different TTS solutions for the Unity engine that I'm aware of. Hopefully when FGU comes out, perhaps they can check into whether any of those solutions could be made to function within Fantasy Grounds.

[Trenloe]

[QUOTE=mervhd;413543 I assume that's because when you copy and past in FG it does not export to a clipboard but keeps the copy internal. I can only assume that is to prevent copying FG's products.[/QUOTE]
You can copy/paste from FG, as long as the record can be unlocked. Make sure the record is unlocked and you should be able to select text and copy from FG.

If on a Mac you may need to use different key combinations - CTRL+C within FG (as its running in Wine) and CMD+V in Mac.

[shadzar]

I just discovered the /scaleui command

This is not the answer for visually impaired people as it buggers around with the rest of the screen settings and not just the text, which is the major problem.


Have the GM/Host of the game try using this extension that will leave the UI alone, but make the text larger. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?35568-Another-14-pt-font-extension

the closet to using a TTS engine would require the GM to access the chatlog file int he campaign folder to be able to read it. but not sure how to get that on Mac to work with Syrinscape....



best suggestion, try Discord. let the GM post text into discord in a text channel that has Text-to-speech turned on for the impaired player.

[Talyn]

Except that won't work for refpages (which has, to date, been the primary thing people have asked about on Discord) because refpages are hard-coded to be read-only.

The couple of TTS solutions I've seen work with web browsers though. Not sure if using a browser handler for the text rendering vs. the limited text rendering we have now would work or not. That way the XML would, in theory, be out of the way as it's the HTML bits that render on the screen and would be piped into the TTS?

I dunno. It's something I'd like to see, though. A number of users have asked both here and on Discord and I know a few blind and vision impaired people who cannot use FG because of this.