Re: Special needs GS?

[aaron@kitten.net.au (Aaron Howell)]

In article <usOdndBtKIi18GDenZ2dnUVZ_s6dnZ2d@comcast.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>Most "adaptive" software was written before the IIgs, so it was
>almost certainly used in 8-bit compatibility mode.  The Echo card
>was widely supported by speech synthesis programs for use by those
>who could not speak.
THere were a couple of ifferent echo cards.
The standard echo (and the echo 2 series),
were a hardware speech synthesizer.
Along with being used by people who couldn't talk, they were widely used amongst the blind community,
in conjunction with a package called Textalker from The American Printing House.
(Early versions were from Street Electronics).
There were dos 3.3 and prodos versions of textalker,
and a version for the gs, which could operate in both 8 or 16 bit environments.
If you're lucky enough to have an Echo plus, That also had the ability to play synthesized music,
and had a limited vocabulary voice which was of much higher quality (it was female and sounded surprisingly human for its time).
The original disk witch came with the echo plus had a loadable ampersand routine which allowed its advanced features to be controlled.
Finally, there were a limited number of other applications,
some tutorials and a word processor called Talking Text Writer, which could also use the echo hardware.
There exists a serial speech synthesizer called Cricket. which was the Apple //c version of the Echo,
Regards
Aaron