accent and speakup

[Adam Myrow]

Yes, the rate is hex and I have mine set to E.  I found out that the rate
was hex by echoing something like 16 to /proc/speakup/rate and it came
back with an error giving the valid range.  I've noticed the pause
sometimes, but at least it doesn't do some of the odd things that the Type
'N Speak does.  The manual talks about a fast mode which is supposed to be
more responsive but is normally disabled because it supposedly causes
problems at very high speech rates or something.  I think I'm going to
have to really work through that manual as there are some things I'd like
to change.  Most importantly, the Accent seems to be inconsistent about
how it handles numbers.  It generally pronounces numbers from 0 to 99 as
full numbers, but numbers higher than that get pronounced as individual
digits.  Sometimes, it says dates with the year pronounced correctly, and
other times, it reads the year as digits.  I also know that it has an
abbreviation dictionary which I played with in JAWS for DOS as that seems
to be the only screen reader I've found that controls it.  It is off by
default which is often a good thing as it sometimes guesses wrong.  For
example, the email address of the list gets spoken as
"speakup at braille.uwo.California" if left on which is pretty funny.  On the
other hand, it says dates in email correctly when on.  For its age, it is
an interesting synthesizer which has a lot of features that AFAIK, never
made it into any other hardware synthesizers.