Re: Making gnome speak

[Erik Walthinsen <omega cse ogi edu>]

On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Ricardo [iso-8859-1] Fernández Pascual wrote:

> That's nice but it would be a bit better if any developer could decide
> what his program has to say and what it has to show on the screen. Think
> about the email client agent: It could read all your messages while you
> are doing something else, with very little effort by the programmer.
> That's the reason I think this library would be useful (but the gtk
> plugin is cool too!). I'll try to write this lib if nobody else does,
> but I think I'm not the best person to do this.

Right.  Trying to divine the text->speech->text interface from the GUI is
almost never going to work, especially as it stands right.  At a minimum,
the application needs to specify some more information abou thow the user
is expected to interact with various part sof the GUI, such as dialog
boxes.

Eventually, I think all of the core GNOME apps should be sufficiently
integrated with optional components to do both TTS and recognition that
sane interactions can occur.  This means designing an API to these
libraries that makes sense and can be easily merged with the GUI code,
then getting everyone to make the necessary modifications to their
programs.

(it should be evident that I'm pretty much out of my league, this being
far from my primary field(s) of interest)

If this is going to happen, to the point where a blind, paralyzed person
can successfully use GNOME, there's going to have to be an effort similar
to the GNOME UI group, probably bigger, with lots of help from real HCI
(Human-Computer Interaction) people in academia and hopefully industry.

TTYL,
    Omega

         Erik Walthinsen <omega@cse.ogi.edu> - Staff Programmer @ OGI
        Quasar project - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/DISC/projects/quasar/
   Video4Linux Two drivers and stuff - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/v4l2/
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