In FLOSS projects we tend to accept to take responsibility for what we do, but we tend to reject responsibility for what we don't do, as if not doing it wasn't a choice, conscient or not. Choosing bit to work on something is still doing something, and we really need to learn to take responsibility for that. Collectively and individually. I am as responsible of the sore state of text-to-speech on FLOSS ecosystems like GNOME as everyone else.
What I'm trying to say is: we can't accept that accessibility is just for the disabled to develop. Commons have to be developed and maintained collectively by everybody, and we should particularly develop things we don't personally need to use the commons so others can be part of them too.
Yeah I once again tried text-to-speech on GNOME and my hears got quickly shredded by espeak.
@KekunPlazas re text to speech, have you tried spiel? Iiuc orca can optionally use it as well?
@philn No, IIUC from what Joannie says here, Orca relies on speech-dispatcher, I assume it has a Spiel plugin? I found plugins for Festival and Flite on Fedora. I tried the Flite one, which gave me barely better result than espeak. I'm trying to understand the state of TTS in general, but finding information isn't easy. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/issues/378
@KekunPlazas @philn my personal recommendation is Pied, which is a simple Flatpak to install Piper voice models, it's working really well with the brazilian portuguese voices and the english ones are basically the best: https://github.com/Elleo/pied
@joojmachine @philn I can't find it on Flathub, do you have a reference to it?
@KekunPlazas @philn It's not on Flathub (for now only, and I believe they could use some help, I believe the discussion stagnated when it comes to sandbox holes): https://github.com/Elleo/pied/issues/2
@joojmachine @philn Oh wow it's sooo much better now! It's night and day! Why the heck don't we have Piper in Speech Dispatcher by default‽