Re: Sound events and GnomeMeeting

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

> Hello to all,
> 
> Several users have been requesting a better support for sound events and
> events in general in GnomeMeeting. For example, when GnomeMeeting
> receives an incoming call, "festival" could be used to read the caller
> name and plays it through the speakers.

Since gnome-speech is included in GNOME now, I would strongly recommend
using gnome-speech for any and all text-to-speech applications on the
GNOME desktop.

The gnome-speech API is at 0.2 and is expected to remain backwards
compatible through the "0.X" series, but is expected to change in the
medium-term, so that should be kept in mind.  All the same, I think it's
suitable for use by other gnome clients now.

Any application that sends sounds to the system does need to be careful
that it can coexist with/multiplex with other sound applications, for
accessibility reasons as well as just usability reasons.

Also, if we start using sounds for notification generally in GNOME
(other than just a few things like WM sounds), we need to make sure we
are using a "hook-able" API for them so that deaf users can get the
notification via some other mechanism.

- Bill