TOPIC:

Hello:

The older Flash version of xerte had a text to speech engine. Are there any options for this in the HTML5 version? Courses are becoming slower and slower to build, and recording audio and storing hundreds of MP3 files is not efficient. Best would be a good, believable Text to video talking head system. But for now, I'd be happy to find a text to speech library with decent voices (people detest most of the poor voices now available). Also.... we're not up to the latest version (about 3 back) but modern elearning seems to have moved to full screen images with smaller amounts of text placed on top with a transparent background. Any new pages that can handle that? Thanks for any comments! Ron

Hi
the TTS engine in the old Flash Player version of Xerte was somewhat limited. only really worked in IE and even then only when the ActiveX component was allowed via browser settings. So although there isn't a tick box now in the html5 player that's because all text and controls are exposed to whatever TTS tool the user chooses to use. e.g. browser plugins or on mobile devices the built-in TTS of those devices. It's also possible to add code to pages to provide a button to read the text of that page so it's all much more flexible and cross browser and cross platform.

Regarding full screen images and text with transparent background all of that is possible with custom code. There are also some pages where you can add images and text over the top and change opacity of the image etc. Maintaining a Xerte installation that is 3 versions back is not a good strategy because each new release has numerous fixes and improvements as well as new features.

HTH
Ron