Web browsing using speech software

[Craig March <cmarch gmx co uk>]

Hi all,

I apologise for the long post.

I'm a lurker of the mailing list due to my interest in accessibility. Although 
I don't use GNOME (a KDE user), I am still interested in the discussions that 
take place on this list, and to be honest, GNOME accessibility seems to be 
ahead of KDE in terms of users, development and support.

As I understand it, there are some people on the list who use Gnopernicus for 
accessibility, either speech or braille. My question for those who use the 
speech engines is what browser do you use for internet use (if this is 
possible) and if so, how well does the software work.

I'm specifically interested in Web access and using speech technology to 
navigate and retrieve information from the web. My final year uni project has 
involved me in researching this topic and evaluating the current status as 
well as providing me with the opportunity to demonstrate possible solutions. 
If anyone has any experience with the anything I have just mentioned I would 
love to hear about it either on or off list.

I am actually in the process of trying to create an extension to the firefox 
browser which will allow a pc user the ability to control the interface with 
speech and listen to the web page contents using a text to speech engine. 
Currently this is being programmed in Java using Sphinx and FreeTTS API's. 
Does anybody have any thoughts on this? I wanted to be able to suggest 
something that was platform independent, well developed and designed in such 
a way that it could be extended (i.e. could utlilise other TTS engines, work 
with other browsers and even other software).

Again, apologies for the long post, but any and all comments will be much 
appreciated.

Thanks again,

Craig