Re: DECtalk driver and french language

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com>]

Janina:


I agree with you 100%.  Note that in point #3 below I mention changing language 
on-the-fly in response to <lang> tags in text content; we also need to be able to 
change languages based on the locale of the program with which the user is currently 
interacting as I note in point #4  (since gnopernicus is a 
"meta-application"/user-agent).

I think that doing this well in the near future will require better-tagged content, 
as it can be quite difficult to identify the language of a text substring via 
automation.  But we can and should create tools to help content creators mark up 
their documents when they contain multi-lingual content.

regards,

Bill


>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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>> gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
>-- 
>	
>				Janina Sajka, Director
>				Technology Research and Development
>				Governmental Relations Group
>				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
>
>Email: janina@afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland