Anyone know a good FOSS text to speech package?

[classicdrogn]

The free as in beer part is the important bit, aside from working offline and not sounding fit to make you want to ram a pair of clarinets through your eardrums. I've suddenly got a a lot less visual acuity and even with a 43" screen set to 1080p and font size turned up so each letter is the size of a thumbnail (as in on my hand) it's a struggle to read much of anything.

Safe to say, my days of visual art (and driving) are probably done >_<

I'm more upset about the visual art, TBH, but either way and in many others it's.... Well, I'm pretty good at the zen biocontrol "stay calm and focus"/"be here now" thing, so not panicking, curled up in a corner, or gibbering in fear, but, yeah, I am Not Okay.

[classicdrogn]

Nothin' huh? Well, it's kind of a specialized request, to be sure. At least there's the Read Aloud extension for Firefox, functional even if it is pretty crap at non-basic-English names. It's also anathema to internet privacy, since it's sending everything in paragraph sized xhunks to be turned into streamed audio pby Google or something, but in the lack of other options... well, what can you do? All hail our corporate overlords.

I've actually found Dark Reader to be almost as valuable for getting the most out of what I can still see, with the ability to switch sites individually between light and dork mode, and control the brightness and contrast they display with.

[classicdrogn]

Another really useful addon is Custom Scrollbars - I couldn't see those bastards even before the newer developments, but now they're solid black and white instead of grey on grey. Still jnot aas nice as the Mac OS X style gemstones of Noia's Scrollbars, but that one got killed by the plugin architecture downgrade-update "for security" (five or six years ago now? Something like) along with so many others. This one, I recommend to everybody, just like Form History Control - even if I woke up with perfect vision tomorrow, I would still want it installed.

[SilverFang01]

I use the text-to-speech available on the iPhone/iPad and the Kindle when I need the functionality. What would be your main use?

[classicdrogn]

Right, well, after writing and deleting two and a half long gripe-filled rants, I'll keep it to this: Linux desktop, mostly in Firefox or a stand-alone epub reader program for stuff in that format, not reliant on an internet connection even when used in the browser. Ideally, able to work with 'fox's "reader view" mode so I don't have to keep selecting a few paragraphs and telling it to read them or have it want to start from the top of the page every time on sites like SB and SB-adjacent fora.