response from tiflotecnia to question about use of voices on jailbroken apple products.

By alex wallis, 12 April, 2013

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Hi all, I thought that forum members would find the following interesting along with applevis staff members. because of uncertainty from applevis about the legal position they haven't been willing to host a guide explaining how it is possible to delete exisiting voices from jailbroken apple products and replace them with other vocalizer voices that are available for download from the tiflotecnia website. I decided to email the company the other day to ask about the position and pasted below is the email I received from them, not good news unfortunately legally speaking. Though of course just because we have an email from the company it doesn't stop individual users from deciding to ignore it and replacing voices on jailbroken apple products, as the information is available on google provided you know where to look and if people can't find it i'm sure other forum members would be happy to help outside applevis on twitter or zello as I know certain people already do. I guess all this really means in practice is that applevis as an organisation can't host information officially. I found it quite easy to find though. I guess it isn't even worth approaching nuance as we would either be ignored or they would want to charge stupidly high royalty fees. email response starts below this line. The use of Vocalizer for NVDA outside of NVDA is illegal. Our license states clearly that the voices are only to be used in NVDA. This is a limitation contracted with Nuance. Rui Fontes Tiflotecnia, Lda.

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explanation

i see this is in response to the topic i posted earlier. and as that topic has been deleted, it doesn't matter much. and i would like to explain the situation. from what i under stand, those voices are not from nuance. they arn't available for download except for the links i provided. they aren't on the website for nvda voices. so if someone can prove there officially from vocalizer it should be allowed. personally i've been very frustrated with the applevis people deleting every and everything that comes across here. from deleting things way back about ios 7 because applevis wanted to protect their precious nondisclosure agreement with apple. because they said that they wanted to stay in good straights with apple because they are basicly the one stop shop for all apple accessibility. which i respect. however, they still have a jail brake forum. for everything related to jailbraking. which if i remember correctly apple doesn't like either. so is it just me or is anyone getting mixed signals or something. maybe i'm just expressing myself to no one because this comment gets deleted because apparently its better to suppress the voice of the people rather than allowing it to be heard in this forum. who knows anyway. so if this comment lives please tell me how you feel on the topic.

Response

Hello Kyle, First, please know that we appreciate your feedback--negative or otherwise. Unfortunately, removing proprietary voice files from a device (in this case your iOS device) and posting them on the internet for others to download is almost certainly illegal because the voices in question are copyrighted. This would apply regardless of whether the files were proprietary Apple ringtones, stock iOS wallpapers, or voices from Nuance (the company that makes Vocalizer and other TTS products). Whether individuals choose to use the Siri voices in VoiceOver is completely a personal decision. But, because of the necessity to download the voices from an external location to get them onto the device--and the questionable (at best) legality of redistributing the voices--it is not a topic which we can allow to be discussed on AppleVis. If you have any further questions, please send them to [email protected]. While we realize this may not be the most popular answer, we do hope you understand our position. Michael Hansen AppleVis Editorial Team

Adding my thoughts ...

Kyle, I wanted to add some of my personal thoughts to what Michael has already said. Essentially, I don’t think that as a community we can have it both ways - we can’t on one hand be trying to encourage Apple and developers to work with us to improve the accessibility of their products whilst at the same time showing that we have no regard for the legally binding conditions that they choose to impose to protect those products. For this and other reasons, we choose to respect the legal limitations that Apple and other software developers place on the use of their products. This means that there are times when we have to remove content from this site, which occasionally results in accusations of censorship - or in your case of suppressing “the voice of the people” - but, speaking frankly, I’m always going to personally find that preferable to being part of a website which operates on the other side of the law. We have an area on the site dedicated to jailbreaking for the very simple reason that it is legal to do and something that members of our community are interested in. However, although jailbreaking itself is legal, some options that it opens up are not. They are, therefore, not appropriate topics for this site (an extreme example being the installation of pirated versions of commercial apps). As I have already told you privately, I believe your intentions were good and that you meant absolutely no harm whatsoever with your recent post. Much of what you described involved moving files already on the iOS device - which is legal and there’s a good argument is the very essence of jailbreaking. However, you then provided links for people to download and use TTS voices which are legally protected from sharing and using in this way. So, we had no choice other than to remove your post. If your post had described the process for changing VoiceOver without the need to download those protected voices (which I believe is possible), my personal view is that there would have been no reason to remove it. I know from past experience that we are never going to satisfy everybody when it comes to our position on what content is appropriate for AppleVis. All that I can ask is that people do at least accept that our decisions are always made with consideration of what we believe is best for this website and our community.

Everyone, this is completely

Everyone, this is completely legal. David you are correct. All of the files needed to complete this process already reside on the device.

I saw this post and I had to reply.

What previous people have posted, I don't understand your position I get that it's illegal to do whatever they're trying to do but I still don't get it