The voice a screen reader borrows

When I write something, I have a voice in mind. It is the voice you are hearing now, the cadence and the hedges and the plain words. For a reader who uses a screen reader, part of that changes and part of it does not.

The words themselves stay mine. The hedges, the plain words, the order the sentences arrive in, all of that is still on the page, unchanged. What changes is the sound. The text is spoken by a synthesizer, in a voice the reader selected, at a speed they set, with a pitch they chose. The voice that reads my sentences is borrowed, and I have no say in it. The sentences, though, are still the ones I wrote.

That distinction matters. The NVDA user guide makes the mechanics plain: there is a synthesizer setting, a voice setting that lists the voices installed for that synthesizer, and separate controls for rate, pitch, volume, and inflection. The reader chooses among them. Some readers use a fast rate to get through a long document; some slow it down to catch every word; some change the voice entirely because a particular one is easier on the ear.

This is where my interpretation begins, because the guide documents the options, and the options imply something about the relationship.

A sighted reader sees my sentences in a typeface and a layout a publisher chose, and the reading happens in a voice silently supplied by their own inner ear. A screen reader user hears the same sentences in a voice they chose, at a speed they set. In both cases the reader is doing the final assembly of how the words sound. The difference is only that the screen reader makes the assembly audible and hands the controls over explicitly.

What that means for me as a writer is that my words have to survive being read in any voice, at any speed, in any pitch. A sentence that depends on a particular spoken inflection to land will not land the same way. A joke that relies on a delicate pause may collapse at two and a half times speed. The writing that survives this is the writing that carries its meaning in the words themselves, in the order they arrive, independent of how they are said.

I find that a useful discipline. The voice I write in is real to me, but the voice my reader hears is their own. Writing for that fact means writing so the meaning survives the transfer, into whatever instrument the reader brings to the page.