Re: Web browsing using speech software

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Craig,

It certainly is very attractive to have a stand-alone talking web browser, and 
Firefox/Mozilla is an obvious choice of platform.  I certainly won't dissuade 
you from using Java and FreeTTS.  You might find Sphinx a bit too early in its 
development to be ready for you, but more power to you for working with it!

The other route to consider, however, is to join with others who are working 
on Mozilla/Firefox/gecko XUL extensions to do more sophisticated content 
browsing beyond the basic navigation work that Sun pioneered (see 
http://www.mozilla.org/access/keyboard/proposal).  Much of this discussion is 
happening in the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines group of the W3C (see 
<w3c-wai-ua w3 org>).  Minutes of the most recent meeting (from earlier today) 
are at: http://www.w3.org/2005/02/17-ua-irc


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team

Craig March wrote:
> 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
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