The assertion that "blind people like robot like voices" is completely bogus
(and for the record I'm blind)
In general, when I use speech to provide feedback as I program in C, I have
the synthesizer pronounce all punctuations and in the lower end devices this
also necessitates turning off intonation and prosodics --after all trying to
parse a fragment of C code as well punctuated literary prose and
speaking it is not particularly useful! But this is not to say that "blind
users like robot-like voices"
(Higher quality speech boxes preserve some intonation and dont sound as
robotic even when you force them to speak punctuations)
It's true that blind users who are forced to use low-end output devices and
programs that are not too intelligent about preprocessing the text before
speaking it have out of necessity learnt to live with these artifacts.
--
Best Regards, ____________________________________________________________________________ --raman
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken as representative of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc. ____________________________________________________________________________