Yes. I was totally serious. I am a Software Architect working on SuttaCentral Voice. You are my Product Manager. Your clear, concise directions have focused my efforts and directed my designs. In fact, you have provided primary guidance for SuttaCentral Voice features and have promoted its core feature, the SuttaPlayer. You provide the What. My job is How.
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I still use SC search when SuttaCentral Voice fails, and SCV search does fail. SCV search cheats by only searching supported suttas. SC search searches everything, which is its true value. There will always be SC search. SCV search cannot match its scope.
I know you’re trying to focus on the translated text, but try this one simple thing. Switch back to allowing the Pali to play with the translated text. And then just let it be, without aversion, without greed, waiting for it to play until you can hear the translated text you want to hear. What may happen may surprise you. Taṃ kissa hetu? Just let the sounds wash over you as you meditate in bliss. And then you may wake up spontaneously babbling “Taṃ kissa hetu?” as I have done.
Aha. I’ll look into that. You’re also my QA Lead. 
I’ll add playing the blurb from section one as a feature for v1.0.0. I won’t add the blurb(s) to the playing of search results unless you direct. My thoughts are that folks who play search results are less interested in blurbs.
ChromeVox may be an Advanced Setting under Accessibility on Chrome browser. On my ChromeBook I just hit CTRL-ALT-Z.
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Oh wow, that’s so beautiful. I guess you’ve been around D&D for long enough to know I can’t often help fooling around a little bit, and I was, in fact, being entirely touch-in-cheek. In turn, it is all the more touching to be given such a sweet reply. 
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Hihi 
Thanks for this one!
Interestingly, it shows 4 search results, but only two of them are correct. The name Sabbamitta only occurs twice in the canon: As the author of Thag 2.15, and as the name of the chief attendant of the previous Buddha Kassapa in DN 14.
The two extra results are two more Thag verses, and in none of them occurs the word Sabbamitta, neither in the Pali nor the English.
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Just listening to the beginning of DN 14, in Pali & English, I noticed a mispronunciation:
“At one time the Buddha was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery, in the hut by the kareri tree.”
Amy pronounces “Jeta” with a short “e”, but it should be a long one.
Sorry, I’m hardly trying a little bit something, and start already complaining… I can’t emphasise enough how much I am in awe about this whole project!!!
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Deal! 
But I can occasionally use English only, right? I mean it’s important to test that it’s working okay. 
lol. In fact, I can have some sense of what you mean. I’m in the middle of destroying (and hopefully putting back together again) my room and I’ve had a recording of the SN56.11 (in Pali) I was given a while ago playing quite a bit. I haven’t quite woken up with Pali on my tongue, but have noticed some little phrases randomly wandering about my head space.
Neat, I think that makes it a more meaningful section which I can understand the purpose of and that, at least I hope, would had value to those with visual impairments—sorry, but I go by personally testing and I can’t test this one.
On a more serious note about product management, I think the principle of build by feedback from your target users is incredibly valuable. I’m only able to test from my PoV as a person with good sight, do you get any feedback from people with restricted or no sight? Particularly as, if I understand correctly, you are more or less plan wrapping up your ‘leg’ of production with the release of v1, I’d definitely think it would be wonderful if you can get some feedback from that user group before releasing (there may be some easy tweaks that would add value that good-sighted-testers just can’t ‘see’).
I think you’re exactly right, I think blurbs would best be left out of playlist readings! Even with individual suttas, for my own personal use I think I’d mostly skip blurb reading, but feel it would be great to have it available for those who’d find it helpful, while at the same time having a quick path to playing a sutta directly (which would be happily accomplished by the “play” button or “expanded menu” possibilities mentioned above).
But your plan with this (if I understand everything correctly) really would seem to me to more or less necessitate including the sutta title in “section 2” (i.e. the section that comes directly after Intro) so that the individual suttas are clearly demarcated in a reading comprised of several suttas.
Taking the example of AN7.84, what is currently read from the introduction section is:
Numbered Discourses 7
8. The Monastic Law
84. Settlement of Disciplinary Issues
And then section 2 begins directly with the start of the sutta text:
“Mendicants, there are these seven principles for the settlement of any disciplinary issues that might arise…
So then lets say I did a search for “disciplinary issues” and got 5 lovely results returned. Unfortunately, on account of the “untranslated segment stopping play issue” I can’t actually test this, because the Player stops after the first sutta is read in every test search I’ve tried. Nevertheless, what I suspect is that this playlist is comprised of 10 sections (intro & sutta text for each). At the moment if you took out the intro sections being read, you’d end up with what could sound like one very long sutta with just the ‘section 2s’ stitched together.
I don’t suppose it would be very sensible to go any further with this point without really knowing what is technically feasible.
Aaah right it’s an add-on thing. I’ll look into that. I’ll also take the opportunity to thank you for really showing the extraordinary value of automated reading, it’s not only opened a door with respect to the suttas (for example, in another thread I remember saying that simply the idea of going through the Samyutta (or any of the Nikayas for that matter) from cover to cover, was just too intimidating for me, but now it feels like a real possibility), but also with general material. Solely, inspired by your work and your demonstration of how far automated voice has come on, a couple of weeks ago I went looking for a voice tool and found a very acceptable free one online which I now regularly use to ‘read’ longer texts. I hope the huge gift the you have given (both me, and I know many, many others) brings you huge happiness.
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Totally unrelated to this thread, but tangentially related to TTS, there is an excellent documentary on old text adventure games called “Get Lamp”. In it, there are interviews with seeing-impaired and blind people for whom these games (although not necessarily intended for that audience) were incredibly rich experiences, giving them a window into what it’s like to be sighted in a unique way.
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Sorry Karl & Mods (and potentially Jason Scott—I’m trusting he’s consented to his film being made available) for continuing the deviation for a moment longer, but intrigued by Matt’s mention I had a look and found the documentary (embedded in a Google Talk Scott gave) is available here.
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I used to play Zork at UC Berkeley. “Get Lamp” was definitely in my quiver.
Added as a bug for v1.0.0
Added as a bug for v1.0.0. Hopefully Aditi’s “jetavane” came out OK? I’m less worried about Amy/Russell/Raveena–they sound like tourists and will miss Pali nuances. I have some tricks that I can try and will have a few words with Amy.
Ahh OK. I was worried folks might find it annoying to wait until the launch sound completes before hearing the sutta. In retrospect, I should have realized that they do have the option of no launch sound for the impatient. Added for v1.0.0
Sadly, I have only found the two of us able to test the usability for disability. I have been closing my eyes and learning to use the screen reader that I will eventually need to use regularly. I am sure others will soon appear. Once we are integrated with SC, I was going to look at further outreach.
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Oh yes, it did!
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Okay, I feel pretty thick around about now! 
I’ve spent a while trying to find Aditi and nothing I’ve tried has worked. Ang. @sabbamitta would you perhaps be willing to share your technical experties with me?
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Aditi is a shy devi who only speaks to those who wish to see Pali. 
Aditi will speak in alternation with your chosen translation voice (Amy/Raveena/Russell).
I’m still waiting for someone to choose Russell, who is a fine specimen of Aussie manliness, well-groomed, humble in aspiration, yet direct, honest and clear, with impeccable intentions.
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Riiiiiiiight! In fact, I found Aditi well before without being about to tell that I had (I thought it was Raveena; I had no idea what she sounded like reading Pali, and although the speed is different their voices are relatable to each other enough to confuse—I feel fractionally redeemed by the fact that at least it did occur to me it might be Aditi earlier on). I’m going to take it as a profound spiritual lesson. 
And so you wish was granted (for at a few sentences at least). Selecting Russell was how I confirmed that I’d already been listening to Aditi.
I’m very happy to have Russell aboard, and I promise to give him a listen every once in a while, but even though it’s really not something I spend a great deal of time thinking about at all, I have to say I have previously noticed, how glad I am that you built around female voices. Just a very subtle detail I spotted.
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I admit to a personal preference for female voices. And I did indeed try to slide that by y’all. 
However, in looking for scientific justification, I discovered to my dismay that I was wrong about gender voice intelligibility. The coarseness of the male voice is more intelligible in noisy environments. Additionally, under ideal conditions, there is no significant difference in intelligibility. One might almost surmise that the male voice has evolved to be clear in times of conflict or even war. My favorite voice is Amy, with her impeccable story-telling voice that gently guides my wandering mind every day back to the spoken words. Russell may be more serviceable while commuting on plane, train or auto–I definitely can hear him better than Amy over the kitchen fan as I make dinner.
Thanks for finding out Aditi and trying out Russell. Aditi does sound a bit like Raveena, but as I listened to Raveena speaking Pali, I gradually started hearing subtle mistakes that Aditi does not make. Aditi can even handle dotted consonants and will speak “tam” differently than “taṃ”. These subtleties are critical for understanding a language where “ananda” and “ānanda” have opposite meanings. Aditi pronounces them differently. My ear can barely hear the difference and is still learning. To prove to myself that they are different, I actually had to use the cmp tool to compare the binary MP3 files. I do believe that we all need to learn Pali well so that we can all, no matter what our native language, recite together in concert. I have seen so many disagreements on translation that I think we need to invest in experiences, such as reciting Pali, that can unite us all.
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I would in fact have been willing to share my incredible technical expertise of just doing nothing but let Aditi speak by selecting Pali & English—but now @karl_lew was quicker, and you found out! 
On another note: Is there an option to save one’s settings? Each time I open SCV again my settings are lost, and if I want Pali & English I have to set it again each time.
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Partially split over the other recent thread, I’m afraid we have another crossed-wire. Many apologies. I’ll pull everything here so as to streamline:
And from this thread:
In today’s dev meeting I mentioned your spectacular progress with SCV, and also raised the above points of discussion.
I have to confess I haven’t followed every single step of SCV’s production very closely and when I casually mentioned “while it’s not something for you will directly take care of yourself, you are building in capacity for different languages to be added” in the quote above I had the vague notion that the plan was something along the lines of building in the capacity to add additional languages in the future, and accidentally/from ignorance gave premature indication that this might be immanently on the cards.
Deeply mired in technical ignorance, I took your reply as a sign that, in fact, non-English language support could be considered on the sooner side, and didn’t stop to think about the available data sets. In today’s meeting it came up that as SC’s legacy texts are now deprecated, any new things being built around SC should be emphatically encouraged to exclusively utilize segmented texts. These in turn, are currently only available in English (we do, however, already have some translation teams working on that and yet other’s waiting to get started once the dev team has built SC’s new translation engine). Many apologies for the confusion (I’d also like to extend that to @Gabriel_L and @Marco here in connection to the other thread).
In other news…
Nice strategy, I also wondered it I could try to do that, but then considered that it was likely that blind people have a whole set of navigation skills and processes that I just don’t have a clue about and that my ‘simulation’ would be to try and do what I’d do as a sighted person rather than rely on perhaps other sense-wisdom I haven’t developed.
It may not yield anything, but I can make a dedicated post calling for a tester if you’d like (even though this is an extremely gripping tale of production adventure, perhaps it’s only a dedicated bunch that keep track of this thread)? I can maybe even look to see if there are any obvious groups to approach?
Well, let us just say it is wonderful that we have several options in SCV!
Would you believe, this is one of the many surprise benefits of having previously tried (but alas failed) to learn Finnish. The difference between the long and short letter sounds is present there, too, and so actually feels quite natural to me.
That’s a most lovely vision. By and by, I will endeavour to do my bit!
Yup, one of the most advanced skills there is, as far as I can tell!
I also asked this above, and learned that the best way to do it at the moment is to select the settings you’d like and then bookmark the tab and open SCV via that.
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My blind friend would only be able to help if the texts were available in German, unfortunately.
She is also not very skilled in technical matters and manages hardly to read and write emails.
This doesn’t come automatically with being blind. Of course for “natural” situations the other sense organs will supply some compensation, sometimes quite to an amazing degree! Especially so when the eyesight is lost early in life or hasn’t been available right from the beginning. But sitting in front of a machine, there’s no other sense organ but your eyes to give you information. You (or a developer) can teach the machine to talk to you, and even to listen to you when you talk. But then still you have to have a training in how to use this.
As I said, my friend is hardly able to manage her emails. She needs the help of another person in order to click on a link.
She is using a screen reader software called JAWS—@karl_lew, are you familiar with that? As far as I know it only runs on Windows OS, and is indeed very expensive! Even with such a tool she would need some training and practise in order to manage simple tasks, and she simply didn’t find the time for it yet.
I found a screen reader for Firefox called Read Aloud, and it is a rather strange experience trying to apply this to a sutta in Bhante Suajto’s translation with Pali text line by line…
And while searching for the screen reader I saw another add on called Screen Curtain Screen Curtain – Holen Sie sich diese Erweiterung für 🦊 Firefox (de), “To assist sighted users in testing web pages using a screen reader by simulating blindness”. I dind’t install it because I was afraid I might not find out how to get back to seeing my screen again…
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Wow! Thanks Ang. Sabbamitta!
You’re absolutely right. In fact I did think of it at the time of writing, but trying not to write an even longer essay length post as I did, I sloppily collapsed everything into a technically inadequate description. With respect to people who lose their sight later in life I was more thinking that rather than something like “sense compensation”, unless their blindness was extremely recent, they would probably still have learned some navigation skills and be more ‘fluent’ in blind computer use than I would be.
At any rate, my basic thought was that it’s probably best to get input from the view point of someone/people who are much more familiar with whatever challenges and frustrations are faced for real and that working together the best available solutions may be found.
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Even this doesn’t come automatically. My friend never had full sight, and already for many years she is frustrating the ophthalmologists by causing the machine for measuring the vision to give only error messages…
At least in Germany an ophthalmologist usually knows nothing about the life of a person with no sight. For them, that’s the end of their skills and an experience of failure if someone loses their sight, and most of them have nothing to advise to such people. You are left to your own initiative in order to find out, for example, that there are indeed associations for the blind and vision disabled who have volunteers to offer advise and for example training for mobility or for technical matters. Health insurance will then pay for a white cane, or for a guide dog, but you have yourself to arrange for the training or for any assistance you may need. The same for technical support.
Sorry, this is really not meant as a critique of your good intentions to help developing a website for blind people; it’s rather an expression of frustration I am having about so many sad stories I heard from my friend… so, actually slightly off topic—forgive me, mods!
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At least to my mind, it is really on topic! Thanks for sharing insight into a world, I at least, know basically nothing about. I’m very sorry for your, and all concerned’s, frustration.
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