Provide a flexible way to increase the pauses between words and sentences.
Canny AI
Merged in a post:
ADA Approved Closed Captions
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Kristi Govertsen
Closed captions that meet the ADA and Section 508 compliance standards. Descript is awesome, but to ensure that industries with public facing video (e.g. education, safety, businesses, etc.) aren't faced with legal exposure. So many institutions, organizations, and businesses who would benefit greatly from the user friendliness and the broad range of features of Descript, but can't even consider widespread adoption of Descript without guaranteed assurance of ADA compliance standards. Having that feature would automatically support your current subscribers in minimizing their own legal exposure, open Descript up to a huge market share of subscribers who must choose outside platforms instead of (or in addition to) Descript. Legal exposure and profits aside, that feature would be one step closer to making the world a better place.
Susan Finch
Has this been confirmed - it is or is it not ADA complaint? I know contrast and size will have an effect and since we can all modify our own templates, I'm wondering if there are guidelines to check for ADA compliance for contrast and size.
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Nicole Berryhill Phd
YES! This would be INCREDIBLY useful. We're currently in the process of using Overdub to make written coursework available to blind students in my voice. Manually adding gaps between sentences for a long script is extremely time consuming.
My suggestion (from a strictly UI standpoint) would be to expand the functionality of the "Shorten Word Gaps" tool, making it a "Manage Word Gaps" tool. Ideally, to include the option to "Insert [input area to define length of desired gap] Between all Sentences".
While Descript is indeed a "game changing" tool for all of its' current offerings, I (for one, with many equally interested colleagues) would most certainly continue my Pro Subscription for all eternity with this specific, automated flexibility. This feature request should really be moved to the top of the list. It would have an incredible impact on workflow for those looking to automate this necessary part of using Overdub on lengthy scripts.
If this function already exists in some other format that I'm/we're overlooking, please advise. Otherwise, please provide it in some automated way, perhaps as described above.
Thank you.
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Ariele SIeling
I have been experimenting with audio-book length work in Overdub, and it's basically impossible to manually add space between sentences for the entire thing. It would be great if there was a "search and add" feature, where you could, for example, search for periods, exclamation points, or question marks, and add a pre-determined period of silence after them through out an entire project. Or even a default setting of some kind where you pre-decide how much space goes between sentences.
That would provide more flexibility and save a lot of headache. Thanks!
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Rick Maranta
Definitely, I think we need this for the overdub voices as a setting to begin with. I would love to be able to change the default pause between sentences and paragraphs. Right now, I have to go through it manually and change them all. This would reduce the effort considerably.
Frameworks
Absolutely! Also, concerning ways to aid ADA compliance as described here, I am recommending the use of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags to provide the control you're seeking over how Overdub generates speech from the text.
For example, to specify a pause of fixed duration (e.g., 2 seconds), you would simply insert the markup
<break time="2s"/>
at the desire pause point within the corresponding text.I have proposed that feature request here and I would
greatly appreciate
your mutual support!OTHER SSML USE-CASES
- Amazon's Polly: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/supportedtags.html
- Google's Assistant: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/ssml
- Siri, et al: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/03/sanity-portabletext-speech-synthesis/