Merritt L. Perkins wrote
- Instead of reading an Encyclopedia article from the screen would it be
nice to be able to lean back and have it read. to you by a synthetic voice? I believe that such programs already exist. Would anything need to be done to the articles so that such programs would work?. . My computer has such a text to voice program in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 but it does not want to work for me. Perhaps it is not compatible with XP.
Resolving this kind of conflict may be user specific. It will depend on the requirements of the voice program software. Normally I might suggest that you read the manual, but in this case, given the nature of the software, you should be able to listen to the manual. :-) It should tell you what it requires of the texts that it reads to you. I would assume that it could handle plain text. If you can feed the printable version of an article, it should work.
Reading a text with your eyes seems a lot more efficient than having it read aloud. There is, of course, a distinction to be made between visual and aural learners. Nevertheless, given the quantity of material that must sometimes be reviewed, when we read a text we can automatically skim over less important details. This luxury is unavailable when every word of a text must be vocalized. To attain the same speed, it would need to be read at a pace beyond comprehension.
- While it would not be part of Wikipedia would free lessons in foreign
languages be a good idea? Once you get started you need to get practice using the language and Encyclopedia articles might furnish such practice. Is anybody interested?
There is already a good beginning for a Polish language course on Wiktionary, though I expect it will in due course be moved to Wikibooks. If I understand correctly vocalizing programs still need to be trained to the user's accent. I'm sure that the entire Wikimedia community will be interested in your reports about your efforts in rendering a language which appears totally unpronounceable to many English eyes. Indeed, the difficulties may be illusory since Polish children can pronounce their language perfectly well before they learn to read. Compare this with the fact that English speaking children have no problems distinguishing between "tough", "through", "thorough", "though", etc.long before they learn to read.
Ec