Re: gnome-speech and proprietory software synthesizers.

["Tom and Esther Ward" <tward1978 earthlink net>]

Hi, Luke.
That is a very good point, and one I have thought about many times myself.
Iam fortunate that I am able to compile gnome-speech from source, and can
make Mandrake rpm packages with the extra drivers included.
However, Mandrake and I suspect other Linux distributions would not want the
extra drivers included as the supported other synths are not Open source and
don't want the legal entanglements.
I am facing this very problem with some blind users out my way that want to
get involved with gnopernicus and the gnome desktop, but they refuse to use
festival because they hate the sound of the speech. Personally, I kind of
like festival, but the users out this way want Dectalk.
So I end up remotely compiling gnome-speech over again with the proper
drivers.
I guess the big issue is that blind users that come from Windows expect
gnopernicus to have all sorts of braille drivers, speech drivers, all
bundled together with the screen reader like Jaws, Window Eyes, etc, but
that isn't how it is do to being under the GPL.
I don't mind doing the compiles myself for myself, but I see gnopernicus
will be a hard sell to most blind users that freak out when the words source
and compile come up.
I really don't know what the answer will be for those users who want
everything bundled nice for a specific distribution, but I imagine those of
us users could build our own Linux packages and put them out somewhere for
public download.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Luke Yelavich" <themuso themuso com>
To: <gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org>;
<gnome-accessibility-list gnome org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 5:51 AM
Subject: gnome-speech and proprietory software synthesizers.


> Hi all.
> I have been thinking about gnome-speech, and compiling the software
> synthesizer drivers for proprietory synths, such as DECtalk and Cepstral.
> It has come to my awareness that there may be an issue to do with
> gnome-speech being distributed as a binary package for various distros,
> without the proprietory synth drivers built. If this doesn't make sense,
> perhaps the scenario outlined below may help to get my point across.
>
> A blind/vision impaired user wants to install Linux on their machine. They
> choose a distro to their liking and want to try out Gnopernicus and GNOME.
> They find out that Festival is free and works with Gnopernicus. After
> installing the relevant Festival packages from their distro, they find
that
> they don't like the voices.
>
> After doing some research, they find out that they can buy a software
> synthesizer for Linux, which can work with Gnopernicus. So they buy it,
and
> install it. However, they can't get it to work with Gnopernicus.
>
> They do more research and find out that gnome-speech needs to be
> re-compiled in order to work with their software synthesizer. However they
> don't feel comfortable and/or don't want to compile from source, which
> makes them feel like the software synth has been a waste of money.
>
> So with the current architecture, is it possible to package a gnome-speech
> package for a distro as is done now, and also have add-on packages which
> can be used to install drivers for proprietory synths?
>
> Let me know if you either don't understand, or want more clarrification.
>
> Regards
> Luke
>
>
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