Re: DECtalk driver and french language

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Hi, Everyone:

Just in the interest of completeness ... because I'm not clear that your
4 points cover it ...

It is important (eventually) to be able to change language "on the fly,"
in the middle of a document using a standard XML/HTML lang attribute.

One of the things we don't yet do well in assistive technology is
support multi-lingual texts. Of course the most glaring result is our
inability to support language texts -- the ones that try to teach you
another language. But, this is also a problem with history, sociology,
religion, literature texts, etc.

I would think we would eventually also want speech recognition
technologies able to understand two or more languages on the fly. One
user case might be a tool that drills you on vocabulary while you cross
the pond.


Bill Haneman writes:
> From: Bill Haneman <bill.haneman@sun.com>
> 
> Hi Nath:
> 
> Adding another language to gnopernicus' speech is something we would 
> like to do. I don't see any significant issues with gnome-speech, though 
> there are a couple of issues with multi-language use in gnopernicus.
> 
> I am cc-ing gnome-i18n@gnome.org because whatever we do in this area 
> needs to be coordinated with the existing GNOME internationalization 
> framework. We don't want to come up with something totally nonstandard.
> 
> I forsee the need to do four things in order to make sensible use of 
> multi-language speech in gnopernicus:
> 
> (1) gnome-speech needs to standardize its "LANG" property so that the 
> languages which can be spoken by a given "Speaker" can be determined. In 
> gnome-speech 0.2 I believe that, although the 'parameters' are all 
> numeric values, they may be enumerations 
> (GNOME_Speech_Parameter.enumerated == true) and in such cases you can 
> call GNOME_Speech_Speaker_getParameterValueDescription() to get a string 
> containing, for instance, "en_UK" or "fr".
> 
> (2) gnopernicus needs to select an appropriate Speaker based on the LANG 
> currently being used. This may be difficult since currently gnopernicus 
> associated speakers with different types of spoken output; probably 
> making this work for multi-language cases will require a revision of the 
> way gnopernicus chooses its voices.
> 
> (3) gnopernicus must, in order to do this, pay attention not only to its 
> own current locale (for the 'default' LANG value), but listen for the 
> <lang> text attribute and change speakers accordingly. In practice we 
> don't have too many examples of this yet, but we expect to have more 
> language tagging in the future. I think we get <lang> tags in our 
> AccessibleText already if the text comes from a pango layout that uses 
> something other than the application's default locale, but this hasn't 
> been tested yet.
> 
> (4) eventually we'll need to provide a means for gnopernicus to 
> determine the locale/lang of the applications which it's interacting 
> with; we think we know how to do this now (via window manager properties 
> _WM_LANG) but it's not implemented yet.
> 
> If what you want to do is change the speaker used for the whole desktop 
> then you can do this with no problem, and I think that fairly 
> straightforward changes to gnopernicus would allow you to select a 
> Speaker appropriate to the locale that gnopernicus is running in. But if 
> different text sources are in different languages, gnopernicus will need 
> to start looking at language tags in its text stream and selecting 
> speakers accordingly.
> 
> I think that it may be worth extending the gnome-speech parameter API 
> slightly to make language-capability queries a little easier.
> 
> Since neither Marc nor I are bilingual (though I can almost understand a 
> little en Franc,ais), perhaps you should be the pioneer here :-) Would 
> you be interested in tracking this with Marc and the 
> internationalization folks within Gnome?
> 
> best regards,
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
> regards,
> 
> Bill
> 
> Nath wrote:
> 
> >Hi all,
> >
> >In Gnopernicus I switched to the DECtalk driver and it works but now I
> >would like to add french language. do you think it will be possible
> >easily or does it require a lot of modifications in the gnome-speech
> >source code ?
> >To give you an idea : In order to add french capabilities to the DECtalk
> >software fonix send us an additionnal tar.gz file containing the
> >following files :
> >- libtts_fr.so (which is in /usr/local/lib)
> >- dtalk_fr.dic (which is in /usr/local/lib/DECtalk)
> >
> >So if you have an idea about how to do in order that gnome-speech
> >considers these files ? It will be very very nice for french users !
> >
> >Thanks in advance.
> >
> >
> >
> > 
> >
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina@afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175