As of today, my computer can __nicely__ read aloud for me !
I'm lazy, i read slowly, so i don't like reading, i skip a lot of articles
I have been looking for a solution for several months
#Accessibility #A11y #Orca #WebBrowser #ZenBrowser #Firefox #Piper #Pied #SpeechAI #AI #Nix #NixOS
I use #ZenBrowser, since it's a fork of #Firefox, it has a [reader view](http://mzl.la/1cHarCP), which has a "Read aloud" mode
This allows you to read aloud the content of articles
This mode uses the [Web Speech API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API/Using_the_Web_Speech_API#speech_synthesis), which is a standard API for web browsers
Sometimes, i want to test the #accessibility of content using a screen reader
I use #Linux, i use [Orca](https://orca.gnome.org) as a screen reader
The Web Speech API and Orca both use [speech-dispatcher](https://github.com/brailcom/speechd) to generate synthetic voices (Text To Speech AKA #TTS)
Speech-dispatcher can use several voice generators, i used to use [espeak-ng](https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng), which was the less bad
There are newer tools that generate voices than feel good, like [piper](https://github.com/rhasspy/piper), some voices are really great
You can [try listening to it here](https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/)
For several months, i have been looking for a solution to plug Piper into speech-dispatcher
Today, i have found it !
Thanks to @mike, all i had to do was simply use [Pied](https://pied.mikeasoft.com)
If you are using #NixOS, just use this configuration
```nix
{ pkgs, ... }:
{
services.orca.enable = true; # for screen reader
environment.systemPackages = [
pkgs.pied # only available on unstable at time of writing
]
}
```
@pinage404 for anyone following this in the future: I had to install two more packages
```
environment.systemPackages = [
pkgs.killall
pkgs.piper-ts
];
```
Pied assumes killall is installed, and pioer-ts is the actual text to speech needed. After adding those two I was able to get orca to work.
However, after these changes Firefox option to narrate in Reader mode (little headphones) disappears. Do you have any idea to why?
@reshi hum, i have the same behavior with Zen
I use to use the Read aloud mode
When i tested, i did it with the read aloud mode of Open WebUI, so i didn't noticed that the Read aloud mode from the Reader mode disappeared
It seems related to this issue https://github.com/Elleo/pied/issues/23
@reshi the issue mention this
> If you do not see the narrator icon, try setting narrate.filter-voices to false in about:config.
from the ArchWiki
It solves my issue
@reshi maybe we should add those two dependencies as dependencies of the pied package in nixpkgs ?
do you want to do it ?
pinage404.rss 
cimm
truh
Reshi 
Mike Sheldon