Re: Using espeak

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

> I looked over the "linux accessibility demo" thread earlier this  
> month to refresh my memory, because I remembered reports that espeak  
> and orca might not work so well together. If I read the thread  
> correctly, though, the problems are with speech-dispatcher and orca.

Do you have a pointer to the thread?  I'd like to take a look.

In any case, I think the higher level summary is this:

0) Speech-dispatcher seems to have quite a bit of promise and I thank
the speech dispatcher folks for all their hard work.  We've not
discounted it and are still interested in it.

1) If someone were to write a good gnome-speech driver for espeak, I'd
happily roll it in to gnome-speech (there's also a driver for Loquendo
that we still need to roll in).  The espeak author contacted me
regarding this, but I'm not sure how far he's gotten.

2) There is a gnome-speech driver for speech-dispatcher, and people have
had some success with it.

3) I've been holding off rolling the direct speech-dispatcher support
into Orca because of the lack of callbacks.  The main reason we want
callbacks today is to be able to position the caret when a "say all"
operation completes or is interrupted.  In the future, we could use them
to move the magnifier region of interest and also to highlight the
current text being spoken as it is spoken.  We've been talking with the
speech-dispatcher folks regarding getting callbacks.  The ball is in
their court right now, and I'm waiting for a response from them.

Will

> Here's where I'm confused--if speech-dispatcher support in orca is  
> being held back by the lack of callback support, does that affect  
> using speech-dispatcher through gnome-speech? The exact reasoning  
> behind the not-so-niceness of using espeak with orca was never quite  
> clarified, but is it a result of going directly from orca to espeak,  
> as the thread made it sound as if the intent was to bipass gnome- 
> speech completely? Are there any issues with using espeak via speech- 
> dispatcher via gnome-speech, or is that not possible?
> 
> Thanks.
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list