Re: Success!

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Rich,

> I've finally compiled all of gnome, gnome-speech, and gnopernicus from 
> CVS, module set 2.4. There was much rejoycing...
> 
> Now, I have to learn how to get the screen reader running. I have a few
> questions first:
> 
> 1. Which is the prefered speech engine. Seems that Festival has no index
> markers, so if speech is interrupted, it may lose its place? WHich engine 
> do people prefer and why?

DECTalk is a fairly popular one for Linux.  It costs ~$50, and seems to work
well.  IBM ViaVoice is not a formally available technology, and the version
that is fairly widely available for Linux (thanks to being on the IBM
alphaworks website for many months) is known to be buggy and hangs with some
frequency, bringing Gnopernicus down with it.  FreeTTS is the current free
favorite; it seems to be more stable than Festival when used with
Gnopernicus, and supports end-of-speech markers; you need to have a modern
Java VM to use it.

> 2. Is there another siste for documentation on Gnopernicus itself besies
> http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html, which is often not accessible from
> here!

It appears that the office remodeling at BAUM this week has also affected
the Romanian engineering team website.  It is unfortunate that provisions
weren't made to redirect to a mirror in Germany.  I'm told the office will
be back up again on Monday September 29th.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team