Yes, the rate is hex and I have mine set to E. I found out that the rate was hex by echoing something like 16 to /proc/speakup/rate and it came back with an error giving the valid range. I've noticed the pause sometimes, but at least it doesn't do some of the odd things that the Type 'N Speak does. The manual talks about a fast mode which is supposed to be more responsive but is normally disabled because it supposedly causes problems at very high speech rates or something. I think I'm going to have to really work through that manual as there are some things I'd like to change. Most importantly, the Accent seems to be inconsistent about how it handles numbers. It generally pronounces numbers from 0 to 99 as full numbers, but numbers higher than that get pronounced as individual digits. Sometimes, it says dates with the year pronounced correctly, and other times, it reads the year as digits. I also know that it has an abbreviation dictionary which I played with in JAWS for DOS as that seems to be the only screen reader I've found that controls it. It is off by default which is often a good thing as it sometimes guesses wrong. For example, the email address of the list gets spoken as "speakup at braille.uwo.California" if left on which is pretty funny. On the other hand, it says dates in email correctly when on. For its age, it is an interesting synthesizer which has a lot of features that AFAIK, never made it into any other hardware synthesizers.
