Make XP Talk 

The most important reason why you would want your computer to read out stuff to you is that you don’t want to strain your eyes reading the computer screen all the time. Another reason could be that you just want to see how far this technology has progressed. In Windows XP, a text-to-speech TTS engine does the job of converting text to speech. Here’s how you can use it. 

Narrator can read the contents of active windows, menu options or the text that you have typed

  STEP ONE  

Select voice, audio, output, volume

Reach for the Control Panel and double click the Speech option. A window will open where you can select which pre-generated voice you want to use. By default you will get only MS Sam’s voice. For more voices (which are nothing but TTS engines that will work with WinXP), you have to get third party software from Microsoft’s site:

http://www.microsoft.com/speech/evaluation/thirdparty/engines. asp. You can preview the voice by hearing it speak the words in the box. All this is fairly easy. In addition, you can select a different audio output if you have two sound cards in your system. This option is possible by clicking on the Audio Output button and choosing the alternative output device from Use this output device option. This is helpful if you want to get all the text-to-speech output coming out of your headset, and not the speakers for everyone else to hear. From the same window, you can also select the volume for your computer’s voice. 

You can select a different audio output if you have two sound cards

  STEP TWO  

Use TTS with the Narrator

To hear the speech with normal Windows operations, you need to fire up the Narrator. 

Go to Start-> Programs-> Accessories->Accessibility->Narrator. Narrator is an application that can read the contents of the active window, menu options, or the text you have typed.

All these options can be selected from the Narrator’s main window. You can access the following keyboard shortcuts to read text appearing on different parts of your desktop:

• Entire window: Ctrl+Shift+ Spacebar. 
• Information about the current item: Ctrl+Shift+Enter. 
• Title bar of a window: Alt+Home. 
• Status bar of a window: Alt+End. 
• Contents of an edit field, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter, or use the arrow keys. 
• Silence the speech: Ctrl

Shruti Pareek