Re: Mozilla - like JAWS or like Hal?

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

I want to strongly second the request for hardware speech synth support. I doubt that hardware synths will again become the device of choice for most users, but they will continue to be preferred by a significant minority. May I advise that the problem of keeping the speech synthesizer out of the musician's current composition is a very frequent topic on the MIDI-Mag (blind musicians) list? Hardware just makes that task easier.

I do suspect, however, that figuring out how best to go baoutspeech support in the complete environment needs to be discussed widely. Of course, the same holds for braille. We have users of Speakup, and Brltty, and Yasr, and Emacspeak, and now an emerging graphical environment. Often these are the same users switching among environments as their needs change from moment to mement. We need to turn this fact into an advantage for the open source environment. Resolving issues around sharing these I/O devices is listed by the Free Standards Accessibility Workgroup as a goal for just this reason.

But, what is the appropriate solution? In braille it seems the issue is mostly licensing. There's one discussion thread.

In speech it may yet get to licensing, but it's not to that point yet because we're only beginning the technical discussions.

Should gnome-speech be extended to support hardware devices and console AT such as Emacspeak and Speakup? As I understand it this creates issues for Speakup because interrupts on hw devices are so inconsistently used.

What about Speech Dispatcher? It now seems quite certain that Speakup will support software speech via Speech Dispatcher. But I don't see emacspeak development moving toward Speech Dispatcher, even though that was the original AT for which BrailleCom created Speech Dispatcher.

I have no answers--but wanted to lay out some of the issues more completely because this topic is important.

Jason White writes:
> Shaun Oliver writes:
>  > one thing I would like to see is support for hardware synthesisers, as I 
>  > am far from  being a programmer of any kind, I can't implement such 
>  > support.
>  > this would assist people in many wais ie. being able to fidd
> 
> I have a DECTALK Express here, and I know I should write a
> Gnome-speech driver for it. The problem is that I don't expect to have
> time to write it in the near future.
> 
> Another option worth considering would be to write a driver that runs
> Emacspeak speech servers; these exist for a variety of hardware
> synthesizers.
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina afb net		Phone: (202) 408-8175