Adjusting Speech Parameters Adjusting Speech Parameters - Regardless of what synthesizer you configured Window Eyes for during the installation, you may not be satisfied with the rate, pitch, or volume currently being used. This section will show you how you can easily adjust these parameters. But before we get into that, a bit of background needs to be covered. Window Eyes supports three different voices. There is the screen voice, the keyboard voice, and the mouse voice. Each voice can be turned on or off, have its’ rate, pitch, volume, or tone settings all be unique from the other voices. The screen voice is used when you read information from the screen. For example, when you read the status line, the title bar of your current application, or you tab to an edit box, all of this information will be spoken using the screen voice. The keyboard voice is used to speak keys as you press them from the keyboard. The mouse voice is used as you read information relative to the mouse pointer or anything relating to the mouse, such as what the current mouse pointer is. Many people prefer to have all of the voices be set up the same, but you can change each one independently of the others. For example, it is common to have the screen voice rate be slower than the keyboard voice rate. You have total control. To adjust any or all of these parameters, do the following. There are four key presses that can be used to set the parameters of the voices. They all include control and alt, and they all include one of the four dedicated arrow keys. By dedicated arrow keys, I’m talking about the four arrow keys between your normal keyboard and the num pad, just below the six-pack of keys. Many people refer to the dedicated arrows as an upside-down “T.” For example, going from left to right, we have the left arrow key, the down arrow key, and the right arrow key. The up arrow is directly above the down arrow. Control-alt-right arrow is called the “voice selection rotor hotkey.” It rotors between the voice parameters of the screen, keyboard, and mouse, or a combination of all three. I’ll press control-alt-right arrow many times to show this. Hold down the control and alt keys, and tap the right arrow key. WE: Screen. Screen. Press it again WE: Keyboard. Keyboard. Press it again. WE: Mouse Mouse. Right arrow again. WE: All All. And again. WE: Screen; keyboard; mouse; all So with each key press, we just rotor between the four options. Control-alt-left arrow is called the voice parameter rotor hotkey. It rotors between volume, tone, pitch, and rate. I’ll press it several times to show you how it rotors between the options. So, hold down control and alt, and tap the left arrow key. WE: Volume Volume. Tap left arrow again. WE: Tone. Pitch. Rate. So each press gives me one of those different settings. WE: Volume, tone, pitch, rate Rate is the default after you first start up Window Eyes. Once you have the voice and parameter that you wish to modify, you can press control-alt-down arrow to decrease the setting, or control-alt-up arrow to increase the setting. The rate parameter can offer up to 100 settings, depending on the synthesizer. The pitch and volume options offer 10 settings, from zero to nine. The tone option offers 26 settings, from A to Z. Not all synthesizers support the possible options. You will need to play with them to see what options your particular synthesizer supports. Let’s try changing a few of the options so you can understand how to change them. So again, I am currently set for “all,” and I am going to leave it there, so I’m going to do a control-alt-left arrow… WE: Volume And I can change the volume…(tap left arrow) WE: tone Tone (Tap left arrow again) WE: Pitch Pitch (tap left arrow) WE: Rate Rate. Let’s go ahead and change the tone. So press control-alt-left arrow until you get to tone. WE: Volume. Tone Now we are at tone. Let’s increases this option. So I’m going to press control-alt-up arrow. WE: All voices tone J. So, all voices tone J. You can hear the voice change. Increase it again. WE: All voices tone K. All voices tone L. All voices tone M. Each synthesizer has a different number of tones that it will support. Pressing control-alt-down arrow will scroll through the options in the opposite direction. WE: All voices tone L. All voices tone K. All voices tone J. Again, all I’m doing is holding down the control and alt arrows together, and tapping the down arrow key. Do it one more time. WE: All voices tone I. Tone I is the default. If I go below letter I, it will go to tone H. So that is how you change the tone. Because we have it set to all, it is changing the tone for the screen, keyboard, and mouse voices. If you wanted to, you could have each voice have a different tone. Now, let’s change something other than tone. Press control-alt-left arrow. WE: Pitch Let’s change the pitch. Keep control and alt pressed down, and tap the up arrow key. WE: All voices pitch 4. All voices pitch 5. Again. WE: All voices pitch 6. Again. WE: All voices pitch 7. Again WE: All voices pitch 8. Again WE: All voices pitch 9. Again WE: All voices pitch 0. After 9, it wrapped back around to zero. Level 3 is the default, so let’s go back to that level. WE: All voices pitch 1. All voices pitch 2. All voices pitch 3. Now let’s go ahead and change the rate option. So I’m going to press control-alt-left arrow to get to rate. WE: Rate Now, I can just press control-alt-up arrow to increase the rate. WE: All voices rate 31. Again WE: All voices rate 32. All voices rate 33. So if I wanted to increase this quickly, I could hold down on the control and alt keys, and press the up arrow key rapidly. The faster you tap the up arrow key, the quicker the rate will increase. WE: All voices rate 55. All voices rate 56. Once you get closer to rate 70 and above, it will be harder to listen to. It will go up to rate 99. Go ahead and set the rate to the level that you want. Now let’s say that you have messed this up to the point that you can no longer understand the voice. One of the nice features of Window Eyes is that unless you specifically save the parameters, they are not saved automatically. So, all of these voice parameters that I’ve been playing with, and I have my speech rate speaking really fast now, you can always just shut down Window Eyes and restart it. Those settings will be lost. I will show you how you can save these settings a little later. So in my case, I’m going to go ahead and shut down Window Eyes. Hold down the control key and press the backslash key. This is a hotkey that will bring up the Window Eyes control panel. The backslash key is normally three keys to the right of the “p” key. WE: Window Eyes Now there are several ways that you can close an application. Typically, you can just press alt-F4. That is a Windows key that will shut down whatever the active window is in the foreground. In my case, it is Window Eyes. I can do that here, or I could go to its’ file menu, and typically in a file menu you will find a close option, so let’s do that. Press alt-f to bring up the file menu. WE: file, save s pull down Usually, “close” is the last option, so I could arrow all of the way down the list, or I could press the up arrow key. Since the first option is always chosen when a pull down menu is open, pressing the up arrow will move the selection to the last choice. Up arrow one time now. WE: Exit It said exit, so I’m going to hit enter. WE: Menu closed. Ok button, dialog. Do you want to shut down Window Eyes? Ok button, cancel c button It pretty much just asked us if we wanted to shut down Window Eyes, and gave us an ok button and a cancel button. I’m going to go ahead and hit enter on ok. And now Window Eyes is actually gone. Window Eyes is unloaded from memory. Now to bring it back, I could either reboot my system, which would take a while, or I could press my shortcut key, which is control-alt-w. So hold down on the control and alt keys together, and press the “w” key and let them go at the same time. This will launch Window Eyes. WE: Window Eyes 7.0; Today’s tip key: Sometimes applications present… I’m going to go ahead and silence that by pressing the control key. We just had the tip of the day there again. Press escape to get out of the tip of the day dialog. WE: Desktop, recycle bin, unselected, list view, 1 of 10. I am back to the desktop again. Now my speech rates are back to where they were originally, before I changed those settings. So, now let’s change the settings and I’ll show you how to save the settings so that it will be there the next time you start Window Eyes. I’m just going to increase the rate a little bit. I’m going to keep this rate fairly low for our beginner users. When Window Eyes starts up, it will default to all voices, and rate. So, we do not have to bother pressing control-alt-left or right arrow because of this. Now I can just hit the control-alt- up arrow to increase the rate for all voices. WE: All voices rate 31. All voices rate 32. All voices rate 33. All voices rate 34. All voices rate 35. Now I’m at rate 35. Let’s say that this rate is my perfect voice. So I want to save this rate. To save this setting, we need to pop up Window Eyes by pressing control-backslash. WE: Window Eyes It just says Window Eyes, because Window Eyes just popped up. It’s control panel is now in the foreground and is the active window. Press alt-f to get to the file menu. WE: File f, save s pull down The first option was save, s is the shortcut. It also said pull down, so if I hit enter on this, it will actually open up another layer of the menu. So I have one layer of the menu that has all of the options under the file menu, but some of those options have more menu options underneath them. In this case, the save option has more options underneath it. Press enter on save. WE: Set file and all dictionaries It has set file and all dictionaries. The menu level of Window Eyes, there is a beginner level, intermediate level, and an advanced level. When you first install Window Eyes, you are set at the beginner level. In this level, very few menu level items appear. So it seems a little silly that you have a pull down menu with only one option, but typically, as you become more advanced with Window Eyes, you might increase this to intermediate level and then onto advanced level. Those levels have many more options to choose from. So, this says, “Save set file and all dictionaries.” For beginner users, this is a lot simpler. I have one save option that will save all of my settings. I only adjusted the rate parameter, increasing it by a few, and I want to save that. I can hit enter on “save set file and all dictionaries,” because that is the current option that I have selected. Hit enter. WE: Menu closed. And that’s it. So now if I shut down Window Eyes, and restart it, which I’m going to do right now by pressing alt-f4, this will load my saved setting. I can do that because Window Eyes is the active window. Hold down the alt key and hit f4. WE: Ok, button. Dialog Window Eyes exit. This will shut down Window Eyes. Default, ok button. Cancel button The default is the ok button. I’m going to hit enter. This is verifying that we want to shut down window Eyes. Press enter. Window Eyes is gone again. We are now sitting at the desktop with no accessibility aids running. If I press control-alt-w, that will launch Window Eyes. WE: Window Eyes 7.0; Today’s tip key… Once again, I silenced this by pressing the control key. Now I have my rate of 35, which I saved last time in Window Eyes. Now we will get this rate every time that we launch Window Eyes. So I’m going to press escape to get out of the tip of the day. WE: Desktop, recycle bin… I’ll silence that as well. I am sitting back at my desktop now. So that is all that there is to this section. Hopefully, it gives you a good understanding of how you can change the parameters to satisfy your particular requirements of how you want to set up the voice. Again, feel free to set them up all the same, or individually, which I didn’t actually talk about. You can easily get to the keyboard voice, and increase its’ rate, or other things. Later on, we will go over how we can manipulate Window Eyes more. Let’s move on to the next section.