I decided I wanted to change cellular carriers recently. I won't tell you which one I was targetting, but I'll just say I was on their "cart checkout page" and it had the usual something along the lines of "by clicking 'complete purchase,' you agree to our (link)terms of service, our (link) privacy policy," etc., etc. Now, I like to be a principled person, and do not want to blindly accept things I haven't read. However, companies make it extremely difficult to follow these principles.
I tend to read slowly compared to most people, mostly because I tend to reread lines and not realize it particularly soon (maybe half way through them in most cases). This seems to be particularly true for legal documents, as virtually all terms of services/terms and conditions are. But what will help me immensely is if I have the text read out loud, even if by a TTS package (I like Festival). So, I set about to copy/paste this prospective cellular carrier's terms and conditions page into a text file. Then I ran the Festival package's script text2wave on it.
Any guesses as to the size of the resulting .wav file, in terms of time? How about nearly one and three-quarters hours? So, in order to conscientiously read these T&Cs to which I'm supposed to be agreeing, and assuming I could read as fast as Festival's output sound, I would be spending over an hour reading it, even if I used some software to read it sped up.
One characteristic of Festival's output is that the tone it uses falls as it continues on throughout a sentence, ostensibly to sound more natural. What's particularly funny about this cellular carrier's T&Cs verbiage is that the very first paragraph begins with such a run-on sentence that with a male voice, Festival is just more-or-less groaning instead of pronouncing by the end of it.
The lamentable truth is that most of these sites' T&Cs are very similar, with the company's or organization's name substituted in the right spots. I just wish for a Web site where some standardized ToS, privacy policy, and so on can be posted for all the world to see, and sites/companies/organizations to incorporate them by reference, so that they can be READ ONCE. Keeping conscientious can therefore be a whole lot less onerous.
I suppose I can sort of rationalize click- or tap-through. After all, I don't think even lawyers read through every law written for a particular jurisdiction. Think of it: you could probably spend years if not a decade or more of time dedicated solely to reading, in my example case, international law, U.S. law, New York law, Erie County law, and Cheektowaga law. The text of this cellular carrier's T&C is about 85 KiB; imagine how much would be required for all laws in all those jurisdictions. Yet somehow we're expected to be bound by and follow all of them. It's just fairly close to impossible.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!