They're harsh. But you get used to it in about a week. Espeak is an atypically bad example, which is why NVDA experimented with a fork (and maybe one day the N

They're harsh. But you get used to it in about a week. Espeak is an atypically bad example, which is why NVDA experimented with a fork (and maybe one day the NVDA work will make it upstream). part of what allows them to stay intelligible is the harshness. I've never tried passing one through an EQ but there are already pitch settings and similar to play with, and given that even not wearing headphones slows me down I expect that an EQ would probably be bad for it. But more to the point there is nowhere to really plug that in to a screen reader, so we can't try it anyway. The audio subsystems of most screen readers are much less advanced than you'd think.