For giving the user an overview of the map we liked to introduce a map description feature. This feature requires a "Read_me.txt" file stored in the same directory as the map (.mxd file). The "Read Me" file contains a couple of sentences about the map, describing an overview idea. Whenever the "identify" button has been clicked, before starting identifying map's elements this will start reading out the contents of "Read me" file. This should be a good start with the soundscape feature for an audience.
For implementing this feature I got some issues. If there are more than one line (which is obvious for an overview) the program reads out only the last line. It is because of the time difference between instruction loading and word pronunciation. It obviously takes longer to enunciate. So what I did, I intentionally set delay in loading Read me file contents. Now after loading each line of the Read me file it waits for 5000 ms. By this time it gets enough time to read out the line. Here is a trade off with the delay and the length of the line. If the line cannot be enunciated within this period/delay, it truncated the previous line to read out the next one. For the current contents of the Washington and Yellowstone "Read me" files 5000 ms is a good amount of delay.
For a better solution of reading out multiple lines or paragraph I searched for couple of other text to speech software like Jaws and NaturalReader.
Unfortunately Jaws doesn't read out lines like sentences! I mean, it reads out only up-to a newline character and then waits for the audience to press down-arrow or enter. Although It respects punctuations like comas and full stops so does our current tts engine. But Jaws doesn't read out a paragraph at a stretch that we are doing now.
NaturalReader is a different text-to-speech commercial software from NaturalSoft.
http://www.naturalreaders.com/?gclid=CK37p-iu1aMCFRNSgwodCHuNvw
It loads the text in a different fashion. It requires user to select a portion of the paragraph then start pronunciation.
In the current version of mGIS the program reads a single line from the "Read me" file, enunciate it and then load the next line. As an alternative of that may be we can try loading the whole text at a time then start pronunciation like NaturalReader.
Loading the whole text at a time is working fine. Now I have changed the program so that it reads the lines of the Read_me file one by one and append them into a single 'fulltext' string. After that the text-to-speech is allowed to enunciate the fulltext string. This reduces the problem of putting sufficient delay in between lines. Now the description seems much more natural than previous one.
ReplyDelete