Re: [orca-list] Punctuation, capital letters, exchange of characters and strings, generally error in the design of Orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Jan:

> I cannot agree with this. Maybe it is not supported by
> Gnome Speech, but the important ones certainly are supported
> by Speech Dispatcher. We have been trying to explain this thing
> to the Orca developers and offer the project, but I must say that with
> very little success.

I may be confused.  My understanding of what speech dispatcher provides 
has changed several times as the result of conversations with Brailcom 
people.  At one time, my understanding was that speech dispatcher would 
automatically handle all sorts of things, such as verbalized 
capitalization, audio cues, punctuation, etc.  If the engine didn't 
support it, speech dispatcher would supply it.

Based upon recent conversations, my current understanding of speech 
dispatcher is that it merely passes text on to the speech engine with 
some additional engine-specific markup if the engine supported it.  I 
believe the words were "it's just a speech *dispatcher*".  So, if the 
speech engine doesn't support things such as verbalized or audio cues 
for capital letters, the user will not get those features.

If this is the case, we have a fundamental disagreement that we need to 
get past.  My argument is that a user wants a feature and they don't 
care how it is delivered.  They just want it to work.  My impression 
from Brailcom is that the speech engine itself must provide the 
feature; if the engine doesn't do it, the user must negotiate with the 
engine provider to get the feature added.  If this is an accurate 
impression, I do not believe it is a practical stance to take and it is 
not being done with the best interests of the end user in mind.

> So lets go back to a constructive solution

I agree.  Let's focus on the user requirements proposed in 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2008-March/msg00566.html and 
discuss how we can deliver these requirements when also dealing with 
speech engines that do not have direct support for them.

Will