tiger-speech 0.7.1

The synthesizer is now always in NVDA's list, and tells you what is wrong if it cannot run.

Why

Until now tiger-speech hid itself when it could not find the engine. The idea was sound — a synthesizer that can be chosen and is then silent leaves you with no speech and no way to hear your way back out.

But that describes a driver which loads and then makes no sound. It does not describe one that refuses to load. NVDA catches that, falls back to the synthesizer you were using, and speech never stops.

Hiding cost the explanation. The start-up dialog was meant to cover it, and on at least one machine it never appears at all — leaving no dialog, no synthesizer, and nothing to tell that apart from the add-on not being installed. One dialog fired from a timer during start-up is a fragile place to keep the only answer.

What changes

tiger-speech is always listed. If the engine is missing, choosing it fails cleanly and shows a dialog naming the exact folder the engine belongs in, with a button that opens it. Every time, with no dependence on catching you during start-up.

You will see NVDA's own "Could not load the tigerspeech synthesizer" message as well. That is expected — ours appears on top of it and is the one with something to act on. Your speech is not interrupted: NVDA falls back to the synthesizer you were already using.

The start-up dialog and the log diagnostics from 0.7.0 are unchanged, and the NVDA log still holds the full list of what was found and what was missing.

Also

If you once answered "No" to the start-up dialog, that is remembered in a do-not-ask file in your tigerspeech-data folder — delete it to be asked again. Selecting the synthesizer works regardless of that file.

Nothing of Apple's ships here; you supply the engine from your own Mac OS X 10.4 install.