Re: Montreal Summit

[meg ford <meg387 gmail com>]

Hi,

Thinking in people with language and communication disorders (i.e. people not able to read/write due to cognitive/mental disorders), it would be interesting to have a IM client able to compose, send and display messages made up pictograms + text. So, messages would look like this:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_h4z60kN9fAk/TBnOIM61kUI/AAAAAAAAAQ8/TM0fBXcTvyA/s1600/cumplea%C3%B1os.png

Also, it would be useful to add TTS support in order to hear messages written in plain text (which could be also useful for blind people).

There had been some efforts in that way:

http://www.fundmaresme.com/messengervisual/

I will bring this up with the IM developers when they meet, and tell them that it was your suggestion. It sounds like a very promising idea to me, and if there is interest, I will be willing to help with it, as well. It could also be a useful tool for Sugar to have, so that children who are learning to read could communicate easily.

but unfortunately only designed to work on an intranet and now abandoned :-(

Furthermore, am I the author of a11y projects. If you have interest I would provide further details.

Certainly! I will contact you and let you know what the  IM developers have to say.

 I spoke to one of the developers of Telepathy about this, and here is what he said:

Currently Telepathy does not support this type of feature. For example, users cannot send emoticons that they have drawn themselves. Therefore, you would need to write a library for this. If you are willing to write a library, they would be happy to have this feature.

Secondly, they recommend that you write a seperate app for this feature, but use the Empathy contact list. They recommend that the feature be accessed through the accessibility menu.

Lastly, if you would like to discuss this, please contact the developers on the mailing list: telepathy lists freedesktop org.

I hope that this is helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions, and if you do begin work on this, I will be happy to be of assistance if I can

Sincerely,
Meg Ford