I crank up the volume and butt right in, just as everyone else does. But now I'm using some somewhat older but larger portable speakers, Sonia Impact, which are LOUD. I experimented with various small laptop speakers, such as he J-Lab BFlex which were fine, and Tweakers, also fine. The built-speakers for the MacBook Pro aren't very loud. Amazingly Alex, is the first voice I have yet heard that understands and reflects question marks and exclamation points!?! This prevents every sentence from being spoken in a monotone. Then I upgraded to the Leopard Mac OX operating system, and found a new Mac voice named Alex. I tested the demos, and settled on Lawrence, not because he has a British accent but because he was the easiest to understand, and sounded intelligent. I went on the web and found a company at, which sells voices for downloading at $29.95. At least, however, it was speech of a sort. Their voice named Fred sounded too much like someone doing a bad Paul Lynde imitation. Most of the voices, however, left a lot to be desired. One of the beauties of Speech for Mac is that it will speak anything on the screen-e-mail, file names, web pages, anything. One day I was fooling around with the built-in Speech program on my Mac, and started playing with some of the voices. I ended up having conversations with myself, just sitting there. I sensed confusion, impatience and condescension. I am a quick and I daresay witty speaker. Who knows how patient I would be? One on one, conversations-by-note went all right. God knows my wife tried to help out, but people.are people. They wouldn't know what that meant, either. I would point to right (the past), to suggest I was responding to something said earlier. When my note was finally read, I would hear, What's this about?Or I don't know what that means. They would hold it, finish, and be responded to by someone else. I would finish my note, and hand it to a person who was speaking. Something would be said, I would begin writing a comment, and someone else would speak. There is a ground rule in the treatment of those who cannot speak their written notes must take precedence. There is a point when a zinger is perfectly timed, and a point when it is pointless.
And notes were unbearably frustrating for a facile speaker like me, accustomed to dancing with the flow of the conversation.
This got the message across, but was too time-consuming for communications of any length. Soon after my second surgery, when it became apparent I wouldn't be able to speak, I of course started writing notes.
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