Any known source for any dip verisimilitude of the Vinaya Pitaka, I’m visually impaired I do most of my study via audio
I’ve never come across any audio recordings of the Vinaya texts. I’m guessing that people who are not visually impaired tend to want to access the texts selectively for investigation rather than just listening/contemplation? It’s too bad.
I just tried FireFox’s built in screen reader on the SuttaCentral.net Vinaya translations and unfortunately (I guess) it reads the Pali even when it is “hidden”.
I just tried this plugin on Chrome and it only reads the visible text:
Recording the entire Tipitaka would make a great project for a Bhikkhu or enthusastic Upasaka !!
I can’t do it because of my foreign accent.
Hello @Ancientmariner!
Voice has been designed to assist the visually impaired, but so far can only read the Suttas. We are aware that having the Vinaya too is very desirable, but we have only one developer—who is also visually impaired—who can only make slow progress.
There are other pressing priorities at the moment, so I cannot promise anything as to when an implementation of the Vinaya can happen, unfortunately. I am aware that it doesn’t help you much to hear that at some point there may be the feature that you need …
Yes, browser extensions like “Read Aloud” can’t handle Pali pronunciation.
As Ayya Sabbamitta mentions, Voice currently only reads Suttas and not the Vinaya.
For the curious, one problem we need to solve for the Vinaya is that it complicates search. This takes a bit of explaining…
The issue with search is semantic coherence. The Suttas and the Vinaya have distinct semantics and terminology. And this also applies to their translations. This affects search because Voice relies a lot on semantic coherence to present related concepts quickly and concisely. The “Inspire Me!” button of Voice has carefully curated examples that let the user peruse the vastness of the Suttas reliably and comprehensively with search results sorted by topical relevance. Voice search results rely heavily relevance for sorting search results. The top result in a Voice search is usually the sutta with the most direct relevance to the search term.
Unfortunately, those Sutta examples are almost useless for searching the Vinaya. For example, the “root of suffering” appears in seven suttas, but only in one Vinaya document. This discrepancy fractures the user experience and requires a rethinking of the user interface that can do the Vinaya justice. What we’ll probably do is allow users to search Suttas or Vinaya but not at the same time. We also will need help understanding the simplest way to navigate the Vinaya. Is it search or something else?
Whatever we do for the Vinaya will have to be simple and perhaps clumsy in the beginning. Speaking the Vinaya isn’t the challenge (except with regards to server space). The challenge is navigating to the document to be spoken. Perhaps we can simply rely on SC itself to present the document to be spoken and then Voice can simply speak what the user has chosen on SC. This would alleviate the need for Voice to provide navigation while allowing the Vinaya to be heard in both Pali and English.
In any event, Ayya Sabbamitta and I are working hard to save Voice from the inexorable tide of technical obsolescence. The rapid pace of technology renders code obsolete and unmaintainable with its inexorable rush into the future. We’ve had to rewrite Voice to deal with breaking changes in our software dependencies (e.g., Vue, NodeJS, etc.). The rewrite is coming along well, but we’ll need to complete that rewrite before looking at the Vinaya.
You guys are great, and thanx u all. I have a giant collect of Audio suttas that I cherish, how great it is that we live in an era where the Dhamma is so readily available. I’m sure the Vinaya will get out there in time