Re: DECtalk driver and french language

[Peter Korn <peter korn sun com>]

Hi Janina,

> 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.

On-the-fly language switching is definitely in our thoughts.  There are several
things that are needed to do this right and fully:

 1. text content needs to be tagged, and rendered by a client that
    knows about and conveys to AT those tags (e.g. StarOffice)

 2. individual UI elements should have locales associated with them

 3. Gnopernicus needs to recognize these locales/tags and render them
    appropriately

We're not far from #1, but we aren't quite there yet (unless I'm mistaken, in
which case I trust someone from the StarOffice team will speak up).  We have #2
in Java, but not in GNOME yet.  We cannot solve that problem ahead of the rest
of the GNOME desktop.  #3 is basically waiting on #1 and #2 (and probably
version 1.1).

But rest assured, it remains in our thoughts, intentions, and even plans!


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team

> 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.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > 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
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