Converting text to mp3

[Linux for blind general discussion]

I don't know how any speech synth, be it hardware or software works at
the nuts-and-bolts level, but I suspect the people who make the
DeckTalk synths have put more effort into ensuring their devices work
with Windows than they have for Linux and wouldn't be surprised if
they've never published any documentation that would assist with
building a deckTalk speech dispatcher module or whatever would be
needed to get them working with Orca. There's hardware far more
mainstream than hardware speech synths that have shoddy or
non-existent Linux support because the hardware vendor gave Linux
users no choice but reverse engineer how to talk with their devices.

And even if the decktalks are fully documented and it's just a matter
of someone with the right skills writing the needed bit of code, there
aren't that many people working on Linux accessibility, and I get the
impression people using hardware synths are a small percentage of an
already small demographic, so it isn't surprising that no one has made
supporting hardware synths a priority. Orca has only a single active
developer, best I can tell, Debian's Accessibility Team is one person,
the Slint distribution is maintained by one person, Vinux collapsed
due to lack of manpower, and those are just the examples I can name
off top of my head. I don't pay attention to what's going on over in
Windows land, but I would be surprised if NVDA doesn't eclipse Orca in
number of developer hours that go into it just by virtue of Window's
larger user base, and for all I know, the people behind JAWS might
have someone they pay just to maintain hardware synth support.

Admittedly, a missing feature really sucks for those who need it most,
but there's not much that can be done if there isn't someone with the
time, capability, and willingness to implement it.