Forum: Editors/Reviewers Hangout

I have posted almost one hundred stories on Sol. Some were lost in each transition made from one home to another. I can imagine what a bitch those moves foe a site as extensive as Sol. (Laz, you are a better man than I.) However, To make matters worse, nearly all my backup CDs were lost or corrupted during my problems with health and encroaching blindness.

In short, I need a special editor a cut above the rest. I have begun to research voice to print to voice software. Dragon, preferably. However, at the present, I can't afford Dragon. MS "Cortana" is the least desirable, because of the Bill Gates Bullying tactics. MS demands I use their software and not Libre.

When I get set up to use dictation software, my editor would need the patience of Job. None of the speach to text software I've found edits punctuation.

At present I shall continue at a snail's pace and write with my nose to the keyboard. Literally.

Wordy Tom

Depending on where you live, most countries have some form of 'social services' for the blind. One of the things they provide, along with readers, are text to speech and screen readers programs. Thus that should be the first place you check out. Those programs tend to be prohibitively expensive for individuals, but the companies mark the price up in order to gouge the government (even if it's only to negotiate a higher contract price paid by the government (typically State, rather than Federal).

If you don't go that route, Apple has always been better equipped for text to speech than PC's, but in either case, it's most often done with add-on packages rather than building it into the OS. :(

By the way, screen readers do read punctuation and case. Since I'm a Lion (the Lion Club's main focus is aiding the blind since the late 1800s) and have so many blind contacts, I include screen-reader descriptions of all of my illustrations (both pictures and graphic chapter headers).

By the way, screen readers are essential for making blind people functional in the modern economy, so it benefits the local governments to pay for screen readers rather than paying lifetime support or setting up blind users in little-used 'newspaper' shacks.

If you need more info, I'll put you in contact with one of my local blind friends (who used to work with such services in the U.S.). He can get you situated (or at least know what to request) pretty quickly.

For the rest of you (especially those who self-publish ebooks (all two of us), email me and I can detail what's involved in making your word screen-reader accessible.