But now that you point it out, if you’re in a place where people use that accent, wouldn’t they understand you even better? And if you’re in a place where people just plain don’t understand you, you can switch software. Huh.

I like your blog. I’ve just found it and it shakes up my world a bit (in bigger ways than this one, but I didn’t have the words to articulate those yet.)

Edit: Not that, er, Ireland is part of Britain. It is good, though, that they have accents that aren’t all standard Received Pronunciation and ‘Newsreader American’.

We have individual accents, and use those whenever it’s all right to do so. We tend to feel more comfortable talking with our own voices than the default voice that we use when presenting to people who don’t know that we’re plural.

I can empathise with the ‘pay now/play later’ philosophy; we’ve sometimes got ourselves into that as well. We’ll end up expending masses of energy on people, talking and doing other properly ‘typical’-seeming things, and then we get so tired that we end up not talking to anyone for whole weekends sometimes.

Good luck dealing with the parents. I know that when we were living with our biofamily, we would often be too overloaded to talk, but they kept trying to make us talk, which was…pretty awkward, to say the least.

~Kerry

I think this can be extended to nationalities, as well: most applications that include a text-to-speech voice include a ‘general American’ accent that isn’t associated with any particular region of the country. Until the release of Mac OS X Lion, the only voices that Apple included with their OS were American voices, and even now, you have to download the non-American voices through Software Update, even though they are available. As far as I know, Windows still does not include non-American voices in the OS. I can’t speak for the defaults included in Linux distributions, although I do know that the Festival speech synthesis programme does have several English dialects available.

As for third-party options? Apart from Cepstral, there’s also CereProc—CereProc are a Scottish company who do voices that are representative of several regions. You’ll find some regional accents of Britain, which I haven’t seen anywhere else! Scottish, Received Pronunciation English, Black Country English, Irish and so on. They haven’t got regional American accents, unfortunately.

We have Proloquo2Go for iOS, although we haven’t used it yet to communicate with anyone. (We’d eventually like to get Proloquo for our Mac as well, in future.)

~Kerry

He speaks that way even when not reading textbook stuff, but when he’s overloaded……the more overwhelmed he is the thicker the accent becomes….if he can even get words out……

We want the Proloquo app, but we’re not sure how to explain to our parents why we need it. This might make you cringe (and sorry if it does) but we don’t want to share just how serious our communication issues can be…..parents either might not believe, or would ask many awkward questions or tell us “if you can’t speak without assistance you shouldn’t be in college” or some crapola like that…..

We have always forced ourselves to have good speech in front of any family member, at any cost. Play now and pay later, has been our philosophy on that subject, not because we want to hurt ourselves of course (and overload hurts a lot, in several ways) but because of fear that if we don’t perform we will be held back from achieving our potential, which is kind of ironic because the same “speech at any cost” is holding us back from achieving our potential! I’ll try to explain that at a more civilized hour…..its 3am right now.
I’m not even sure how exactly Proloquo will help us, but we all just have a *gut feeling* that it will.

it’s like that article in Ragged Edge or the other disability mag (Mouth?) … where a girl from a special ed class was protesting that she wasn’t allowed to eat french fries. like just because she had Down Syndrome she wasn’t allowed the choices like regular kids have, like eating junk food sometimes.

that’s the same thing as being able to choose to talk colloquial english with your friends and family vs. standard english at a job interview.

of course probably also the Text-to-Speech companies’ lawyers are afraid that the voice actors could make a caricature of the dialect accents and get them in trouble for cultural stereotyping.

there was a movie out this summer, THE HELP (i only read the book, i missed the movie) but in the book the parts narrated by the main African American characters were written with several very different dialects. it was controversial because the writer was white and one of the Black accents was kind of extreme. however, this was the accent that the author had grown up hearing from her nanny. and some of the actresses said they knew people who sounded like that, who grew up in a particular place and time and circumstances… the one problem was that in the book, most of the white people didn’t speak particularly southern, although clearly they were members of a very particular culture to their place and time and circumstances, also. so there should have been some regionalisms.

of course (and i didn’t want to believe this when i first read the book but it was pointed out and i couldn’t argue with it really…) the other problem with that book was a white writer trying to tell Black history. there should be more books getting made into movies where we see the African American perspective on the civil rights movement times without the white filter and without there having to be a white “Help” in the story. because a lot of people didn’t have somebody from outside to “rescue” them and they managed to make things happen.

yeah — they should have it to where if you write spanglish it can code-switch and pronounce the word in the right language! that would be so cool.

Oh I forgot to mention —

Regarding the arguments for using the dominant dialect/accent… one of the things I couldn’t articulate at first, was the way it puts a different standard on people depending on whether they speak or type. Like both speaking and typing people are encouraged (to put it mildly) to speak in the dominant accent, but the implication is that there should not even be a way for people who type to communicate, to speak in nondominant accents, whereas speaking people at least have some level of choice.

Oo yeah I know the kind you mean. That’d be cool.

I always love the way that there are so many different ways to speak a language(s). Where I lived before I moved here, people would just outright mix Spanish and English within the same sentence even.

they should make that accent that you get in border areas, the bilingual people accent … not a *foreign* accented english, but an english that somehow *whispers* that you also speak spanish perfectly. i like that one.