Orca/C2/Adjusting-speech-through-preferences-dialog/English
Adjusting speech through preferences dialog Welcome to this tutorial on Orca setting! In the tutorial on First time with Orca, we learned how to do initial set-up of Orca and open the text editor. Perhaps you might have found the speech to be a bit fast. Perhaps you wanted to hear shortcuts for all the items. Or may be you needed some more assistance. We are now going to see how we can make finer adjustments to Orca. So let's first start Orca. Remember? We press alt + f2 to get to the Run dialog and then enter Orca. Orca has its own set of adjustable preferences. To access these settings we will now press Insert plus Space. If you are a laptop user, you will press Caps-lock plus Space. As you heard, Orca told us our current location which is the preferences dialog. There are several sections or tabs in the preferences. These are referred to by Orca as Pages. So by default, we are on the General Page. You can use left or right arrows to find other pages. For example I used the right arrow to find the Speech Page. Well! There are many such pages which we will look at. So let's be at the general page.I will press left arrow to locate it. Press the tab key. The first setting is the Keyboard Layout. If you are using a desktop then the option "Desktop Layout" must be selected. These are radio buttons which you can navigate by pressing the up or down arrow. I will press down arrow to see what all options are available. Remember the insert VS caps-lock key which we referred to some time back? Well! As you know laptops generally don't have a numeric key pad which desktops do. So there are a few commands which laptops can't do because they are related to numeric keypad. We are going to look at some very basic settings here. There are Advanced Settings which we will leave for future tutorials. You can press tab until you hear "Quit Orca without confirmation". If you check this check-box using space-bar, it means next time you quit Orca, it will not ask you for a confirmation. A checkbox is something which you can turn on or off using spacebar often called as toggling. So I will press the spacebar once to check the item or turn it on. Press it again to turn it off. Generally it is a good idea to keep this unchecked. Now again press tab till you hear Show Orca main window. Again Orca said "Checkbox not checked". It means that this is a similar item like the previous one. If you keep it checked using the space-bar, then every time you start Orca, you will always have one active window showing the preferences and quit buttons. Press tab to find Start Orca when you login. This option might be very obvious. You guessed it right. You can have Orca automatically start up when you log in. The next option we will tab to is for presenting objects under mouse. This is an interesting feature. If you check this check-box, Orca will respond by telling you what is there under the mouse pointer. As a beginner I would not recommend enabling this. So these are a few important options in the general page. Now press Tab button till you hear Apply button. Press Enter to activate. So we are done with the general page. Now keep pressing the Tab button. You will come back to a point where Orca will tell you the page title. Now hit right arrow once to go to the Speech tab. The moment you press Tab, you will hear the first item which has to be checked. If this is unchecked, the speech will be disabled and that's not what we want. Press Tab to find a drop-down for Speech system. By default it has Speech Dispatcher. Well we will not touch this setting as it is for an advanced user. Similarly press Tab and find the drop-down for Speech Synthesizer. Don't change the default option unless you want to use another synth apart from the default one. Press tab again and you will find the drop-down which asks us, what we want to adjust the settings. This includes many options but for now we will set it generically which is for, default. Press tab again. Now you will find a drop-down of all the different voices available for Orca. You can use up or down arrow to select any voice you wish. But for now let's settle on the default English voice. Now press Tab again. You will see the slider for the Speed Adjustment. Adjust it to have Orca speak faster or slower as you like. You can use the up or down arrow to change the settings. Press Tab to find similar option for Pitch. Set it to 5.2 and press Tab to the Volume. Adjust according to your choice. The next option we can press the tab for is for the amount of punctuation you would like Orca to speak. I will just use up and down arrow to see what are the available options. For example if you are reading an article or a story, you don't want Orca to read all the dots and dashes. But if you are a programmer like me then you want to here every thing.Right now though,just set it to none. The next option is, should Orca be detailed in every thing or should it be as precise as possible. Press tab again. You will find verbosity panel.Just use the up and down arrow.You will find its brief and verbos. A beginner should keep it on verbos. The next few options are advanced enough and we will just tab through them and locate two extremely important options. so will tab till we locate the option speak object mnemonics. This is again a check box. Checking this with the space bar will instruct Orca to also tell you the shortcuts for every widget. Pressing on Tab again will immediately take us to the option for setting tutorial messages on or off. I will absolutely recommend you to check it if you are a first time user to Orca. So we will press the spacebar on this one. What this option does? well let's see right away. Now keep pressing the Tab button, until you reach the apply button for this section. Press enter, or space bar to activate it. Now press tab till you hear Orca say speech tab. Now did you hear it tell you what you can do to navigate? Press shift tab to move to OK button. Again, Orca is telling you that you can use space bar to activate this button. And hey! do you now feel comfortable with the speed? you are the one who set it now for your comfort. Any ways hit space or enter on the ok button and the preferences dialog will close. So now we know how to make basic adjustments to Orca. We will come back to the Orca preferences in later tutorials for other purposes. till then goodbye and have fun! By Sameer and Ankita Shanbhag. Spoken Tutorials are a part of the Talk to a Teacher project, supported by the National Mission on Education through ICT coordinated by www.spoken-tutorial.org and developed at IIT Bombay. More information on the same is available at the following link http://spoken-tutorial.org/NMEICT- Intro".
