Re: [g-a-devel]Accessibility talk at linux.conf.au

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 20:20, Colin Charles wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 16:16, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> 
> > For those who are interested, I have put the paper that will be in the
> > conference proceedings up at
> > http://www.gnome.org/~malcolm/a11y/paper.html and I can only hope I did
> > not misrepresent things too much. In another universe I would be more
> > organised and would have had time to ask somebody to review it first; in
> > reality, I finished it off just before Christmas and the organisers
> > needed it right then.
> 
> I was at the talk as well, and just had a few comments. I was glad that
> you didn't demo Gnopernicus, because with a stock Fedora install,
> festival is pretty broken.

Well, I did not demonstrate the speech synthesis portion. I did use
gnopernicus to coordinate the screen magnifier startup, etc.

> 
> My question to you (and I didn't want to put you in a spot yesterday) is
> what's a good TTS system to use? There's DECTalk (USD$50), there's
> ViaVoice (used to be free; costs money now; Mark the last time I checked
> used this), and festival (not so good). There's flite/eflite, and how's
> that?

I have no idea about what is good, bad, or indifferent here. Since I
only play around with this stuff, I tend to stick to the open source
alternatives. I find festival to be tolerable if I listen carefully.
FreeTTS feels a bit easier to use, but having to download and install
Java is always annoying for me (being a modem user at home) so I have
not used it as much.

I have zero experience with the commercial offerings, so hopefully
others will comment with recommendations there.

Cheers,
Malcolm