Firefox Screenreader Extension - Fire Vox
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Anyone else tried this? Seems quite good, although intensely annoying after a few minutes (I had to uninstall it due to annoying everyone else in the office!)
If anyone can tell me whether it can be turned off, I might re-install it.
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The Watchmaker Project - my personal blog
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I've only seen FoxyVoice before. That is shut up by clicking the menu mouse button on the icon that appears in the status bar.
I'll check out Fire Vox.
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Jon Gibbins :// blogs at dotjay.co.uk, works with Analog.
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If you go to Tools, Fire Vox Options, you can uncheck Echo Keys and Speak Events. If those two are off, then the only times that Fire Vox will speak anything will be if there is an alert pop up box, if you are in the Fire Vox Options menu, or if you have explicitly told it to read something on the page. But it will not automatically read the menu bars or the keys that you are typing, so that will resolve the annoyance problem. The reason that I do not fully turn off the reader is to prevent users from accidentally shutting it off and be left without any way of reactivating it.
By the way, the latest version of Fire Vox supports the FreeTTS Java based TTS engine, so it is now finally cross OS compatible. I have personally verified it to work with Mac OS X and have gotten user reports saying that it works on Linux as well.
Also, since the issue of MathML screen reading has been mentioned elsewhere in the Accessify forums, I would just like to point out that Fire Vox supports MathML and presents it to the user using Nemeth code.
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I've got Firevox to work with Mac OS X after some difficulty. However, I have not been able to successfully duplicate the installation on other macs. The biggest problem is getting the .java.policy permissions to allow the necessary write access for the TTS .jar installer. Could someone post what procedure they followed to change the policy file and complete the install?
Thanks in advance.
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Have you tried giving this directory
/system/library/Frameworks/JavaVM/Framework
full permissions? You only need to do this for the installation, afterwards you can restore your original settings.
Unfortunately, I am not a Mac user myself so I don't know much about setting permissions and such. However, I have watched a friend set it up and get it working, and he explained what he did with permissions in step one here: https://webspace.utexas.edu/chencl1/clc-4-tts/mac_install.html
I've gotten an email from a user saying that he is working on a step by step installation tutorial for Mac, so once he finishes that I will link to it from my site.
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If I might make an observation, clc4tts…
In my view, the clc4tts page is so dry and 'wordy' in appearance, so much so that it is quite off-putting.
I would greatly like to get Firefox (OS X) working as a speaking browser, but frankly the page makes what may be a relatively simply procedure appear to be a lengthy and convoluted affair.
Maybe I'm impatient, maybe I'm easily intimidated by blocks of text, but either way, I've visited that page several times with a view to 'finally getting it sorted' and each time I've simply glazed over and walked away.
Now, of course, I know that there's not that much there, but evenso, I still believe that the product would benefit from having some more thought given to how the information is presented.
It might help to split off complementary content, such as version/bug history, into other pages, so as to make the information more focussed.
Also, it might be a reasonable idea to have simple, but complete sets of step by step instructions tailored to each OS, rather than having everything thrown in together with a side-note about some considerations for OS X.
It would be good to see you develop a few pages and present it as a proper product, breaking it down into separate parts. As it stands, it makes it appear as some kind of dry, esoteric information meant for eyes of IT bods only and unlikely to be of interest to the average joe such as myself.
(Fwiw, I feel that this is typically an issue with products and projects buried with educational establishment websites or the sites of open-source communities such as sourceforge.)
Anyway, just a (protracted) thought.
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(OS X)
Fwiw, I downloaded everything I appeared to need.
I've run and installed the clc4tts_freetts_installer.jar file.
I've installed the Internet Plugins recommended for OS X.
I've installed the three Firefox extension and java is enabled in Firefox, but still nothing.
And yet, I'm stood here holding freetts-1.2.1-bin Folder like it's the bit left over when building flat-pack shelves has somehow gone wrong.
I don't see any simple way to install - or whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing with it.
It mentions installing via unix, but nothing that relates to OS X (I know that OS X has a *nix core, but I'm not IT enough to know how to translate the Unix instructions into something usable on OS X.
Like I said in my previous post, too convoluted and too technical.
I may just uninstall the extensions and plugins and write the idea off.
I consider myself to have a better understanding of technical things than the average joe, but if I can't seem to understand what goes where, what hope has the really non-technically-minded user who might really benefit from this facility?
A nice idea, (very) badly presented, imho.
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clc4tts: Yeah, I was the one who emailed you about putting together the tutorial for OS X. I'm planning to work on it this weekend with a bunch of cloned bootup drives, so hopefully I can replicate the results on multiple drives. The holdup has been in nailing down the java.policy procedures so the jar will install correctly. I'll post when I have details to report.
Later.
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