I have it in my plans to write such an add-on. However, it requires
the new speech framework from NVDA, which has been in development for
a long time, and I don't know when it's going to be released - I need
to ping NVDA devs.
I think this is a very good idea to have such a functionality, and
it'snot just for fun. For example, one major use case for it is to
replace punctuation marks with sounds. I am reading and writing
programming code all day long and I have to listen to tongue twisters
of left paren right bracket left brace all day long - I expect if they
are replaced with very distinct chimes beeps and bangs - that would
significantly increase my productivity.
Another use case is to replace frequently used words, such as "blank",
"has attachment", "no next paragraph" with sounds as well.
As for Jaws, I remember playing with their feature and I came to
conclusion that it was poorly implemented. They don't synchronize
speech with sounds, and so the sounds may play at a random time. For
example if you replace a period with a ding, it may sound in the
beginning of the sentence, not in the end, which would be useless to
me. Correct me if I'm wrong and things have improved in Jaws. And as
usual, this is not to start a screenreader war, just trying to have an
objective comparison of features.
--Tony