Re: Hardware synths was Re: Mozilla - like JAWS or like Hal?

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Tom & Ester,

> I would certainly like to take on the job of writing hardware drivers for
> gnome-speech, but the problem is getting my hands on the various synths for
> testing.
> the Doubletalk line of synths would be probably easy to support as RC
> Systems has good development documentation. I have also got lots of
> documentation on the Dectalk Express line of synths.
> My problem is that I don't know anyone who can sell or lend a synth like
> that for the time it would take to write, debug, test, and commit the
> drivers.
> Do you know of such a way to get ahold of low-cost or lending synths in
> order to write the drivers?

I would approach the hardware vendors, send them a resume of your programming 
work, and make the offer to write the drivers in exchange for a ~90 day loan 
of the hardware (and perhaps the ability to purchase them at cost if you 
like).  A vendor who would like to see more sales should be interested in such 
an offer...


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Janina Sajka" <janina rednote net>
> To: "gnome-accessibility-list" <gnome-accessibility-list gnome org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 10:12 AM
> Subject: Re: Mozilla - like JAWS or like Hal?
>
>
>
> > 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.
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
> >
> > --
> >
> > Janina Sajka, Director
> > Technology Research and Development
> > Governmental Relations Group
> > American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
> >
> > Email: janina afb net Phone: (202) 408-8175
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
>
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