[CGMZ] Text To Speech (Patreon)

Adds text to speech to your game, either for gameplay or accessibility reasons.

! SEE BOTTOM OF POST FOR UPDATES !

Hi all, introducing [CGMZ] Text To Speech!

This plugin adds Text To Speech to your game, which is technology that can speak text out loud. This plugin can be used for either gameplay or accessibility.

Gameplay

If you want a classic text to speech voice to say something in your game, this plugin can handle it. Use a plugin command to easily speak a line of dialogue in familiar voices. You can control the volume, pitch, and rate of speech as well.

Accessibility

Text To Speech can help some gamers enjoy your game by reading text on screen out loud to them. This can be important for people with low vision, dyslexia, or other conditions that may cause them to struggle with text in games.

Please note that simply including this plugin into your game will not accommodate everyone, it is just one thing in a range of design considerations that can lead to a more accessible game.

Preview

You can see a video preview of the plugin in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6ZMC5H2yX4

Optional

Of course, not everyone wants Text To Speech, so this plugin makes it completely optional. You can control this with a simple game switch, or you can also integrate it with an options plugin such as [CGMZ] Options to add an option to toggle Text To Speech on or off. To add it as an option, if using [CGMZ] plugins, you do not need to know any JavaScript. Simply type in the symbol "cgmz_tts" in the symbol parameter and it will automatically function.

Roadmap

As with all of my plugins, this plugin will receive lots of support. There are already some planned features to be added in future updates. These include:

Better handling of automatic reading for choice window options

Additional voices

Do you have any ideas you'd like to see added to the plugin not already listed above? Let me know in the comments or in my Discord's #suggestion channel! I appreciate all suggestions I get and add them all to my to-do list.

Happy RPG Making!

This version adds the ability to use TTS via the plugin command for gameplay purposes while still having it be OFF via the switch or option for the automatic TTS when selecting commands in a window.

This should effectively separate the use of TTS for accessibility from the use of TTS for gameplay reasons, allowing you to provide the player with a way of turning TTS off for accessibility while still hearing it for gameplay reasons.

This version adds a framework for list windows to read the currently selected item. This should easily allow integrating plugins to work with this, as they only need to define a single function that returns the name to read for each index and this plugin handles the rest. Documentation has been updated with instructions on how to do this.

This update also adds the option to read some default list names. It can read the skill and item names from the list window in both the menu and in battle. It can read actor and enemy names in battle. It can read items in the shop.