From the Tech-VI list owner:
While JAWS allows you to change the pitch, volume and speech rate of Eloquence, there are other voice characteristics within Eloquence which JAWS doesn’t allow you to change in its Voice settings dialog. However, by carefully modifying an .ini file, you can change these settings. Examples include roughness, breathiness, head size and inflection, the latter being called pitch fluctuation.
The following message from the JFW list explains how to do this. These instructions must be followed precisely. Otherwis...
From the Tech-VI list owner:
While JAWS allows you to change the pitch, volume and speech rate of Eloquence, there are other voice characteristics within Eloquence which JAWS doesn’t allow you to change in its Voice settings dialog. However, by carefully modifying an .ini file, you can change these settings. Examples include roughness, breathiness, head size and inflection, the latter being called pitch fluctuation.
The following message from the JFW list explains how to do this. These instructions must be followed precisely. Otherwise, your changes either won’t get saved or you could wind up making undesirable changes to your Eloquence voices. The original poster’s advice about making a backup of the original .ini file should be followed.
I am not able to provide free, individual support on how to accomplish this and I don’t want to be blamed if your changes result in undesirable effects. Back up the original file before making any changes.
This applies to the Eloquence voices and not to the Vocalizer voices.
The audio file referenced in the original message is no longer available. Bear in mind that this message was posted a while ago.
I am grateful to Leo Bado for documenting how to do this.
08/22/23 #23403
Hey guys, I found the place where you can change the values of the voice definition parameters for Eloquence in Jaws! Yes! That’s right! You know, those same parameters that right now are on test in IOS beta. I knew these parameters are an inbuilt feature, and I didn’t rest until I found them, well, let’s not be so dramatic lol.
You may want to carry out all the process by using a vocalizer voice instead of Eloquence.
First of all, copy and paste the file that contains the values in a safe location, so that you can use it as a backup in any given scenario. Go to the following path:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Freedom Scientific\Shared\Eloquence\6.1
Now copy the file “ECI.INI” and put it in a safe location. Notice that in this folder there are two files with the same name, so make sure you’re saving the right file .ini.
Now, to modify the values contained in ECI.INI you have to launch notepad as an administrator, press control plus O to open a file in Notepad, and locate ECI.INI in the explorer. After pushing control plus O though, make sure to change to “all files” the type of file extensions that you can open with Notepad, otherwise you won’t be able to locate ECI.INI.
Once Notepad opened ECI.INI, push control plus F, and type “enu.syn” without any quotes, and hit enter. Now push escape to close the dialogue. The focus of the cursor should have landed on the language-specific parameters for Eloquence, which in this case is English United States. For English UK, you should locate the following string:
“eng.syn”
Now hit the home key to get you to the beginning of the line, and start arrowing down until you find a similar line to this one:
Voice1=0 50 65 30 0 0 50 92
These are actually the values you should modify to change the voice. Notice that after the = sign there are 8 values separated by a blank space. Those values correspond respectively to:
Gender
HeadSize
PitchBaseLine
Pitch Fluctuation
Roughness
Breathiness
Speed
Volume
All of them scale from 0 to 100 except for gender. In this case you use 0 for male and 1 for female.
Now, for some reason changes has never a real effect on speed and volume, so I believe that Jaws is simply overwriting those parameters no matter what you do, but for what it’s worth, modifying the other parameters do have a real effect.
After performing any change, don’t forget to save the document.
You will also notice that there are 8 voices under each language specific setting, (e.g., voice2, voice3, etc.(. Those alias correspond respectively to Reed, Shelly, Bobby, Rocko, Glen, Sandy, Grandma and Grandpa. So, when you modify voice1, you’re really modifying Reed and so on and so forth. Since I always want to have Reed using the default values, but I also wanted to introduce modifications to use a customized voice to read, I modified Voice4, namely Rocko, an saved the changes. Then, I created a new voice profile based on Eloquence, and chose Rocko to be used in all contexts, PC, Jaws cursor, keyboard, etc. In this way I can have these other profiles and always come back to Eloquence using the Reed voice by default.
Best,
Leo Bado
David Goldfield,
Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist
Director of Marketing,
Blazie Technologies
Am Yisrael Chai
The Nation of Israel Lives!
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