Re: Desktop speech configuration

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

I'd suggest that there is also a use for people of normal physical
ability who wish to use speech feedback as an enhanced/supplementary
feedback mechanism- i.e., 'you've got mail' type notifications, or
having something read a text file to me while I'm cooking. But, ATM,
anything like that is impossible to set up (as far as I can see.)

Luis


On Fri, 2003-10-24 at 20:15, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> We currently have two main reasons to use speech on the Gnome desktop:
> 
> 1) To provide information to those who would otherwise be unable to 
> obtain that information - probably the preserve of Gnopernicus in screen 
> reader mode at present
> 2) To fill in for people who are otherwise unable to speak - Dasher 
> implements this, I'm not sure about anything else
> 
> The two have quite different needs - (1) will be heard by someone who is 
> going to hear it a lot, and so optimising for speed of information 
> presentation is sensible. (2) is likely to be heard by a wide range of 
> people, and so should probably be as close to "normal" human speech as 
> possible.
> 
> Currently configuration for (1) is dealt with entirely within
> Gnopernicus - presumably the idea is that someone who falls within the
> catagories that require (1) will be using Gnopernicus for all of their
> speech needs. I'm not sure that this is necessarily the case for (2) - 
> we can certainly imagine that a user may wish to use different means for 
> producing text for different purposes, but may want all of it spoken. 
> 
> What's the best way of resolving this? It seems to me that there ought 
> to be a system-wide speech configuration system which could perhaps 
> offer defaults of (1) or (2) - the number of people requiring both would 
> seem likely to be small (perhaps applications should be able to flag the 
> purpose of their speech output?). Having to configure speech in multiple 
> applications seems like the wrong way of solving the problem, even if 
> most users would tend to only require speech from a single application, 
> but currently it seems to be the only way of doing things.