Re: [orca-list] plugging other language voices

[Tomas Cerha <cerha brailcom org>]

Willie Walker wrote:
>   Theoretically, an assistive technology can talk to
>   multiple speakers from multiple drivers, with the main
>   limitation being audio device contention between 
>   multiple speech synthesis engines.

Yes, this is a very low level access from the AT's point of view, but as 
long as it is implemented within the Gnome Speech layer I don't think 
this really matters for Orca itself, since the language (locale) 
information is already exposed to the Orca Speech API.  I am able to 
make use of the locale information immediately in the Speech Dispatcher 
backend, since Speech Dispatcher takes care of all the lower level 
details of language switching for us (for example it is possible to use 
different synthesizers for different languages).

So I can see two *independent* problems in making Orca multi-lingual:

  1) Providing the correct locale information in all text being spoken
     by Orca using the existing 'locale' ACSS attribute.

  2) Implementing language switching according to this information in
     different speech systems.  This is about a one minute job for
     Speech Dispatcher.   With Gnome Speech this is a little more work,
     but still doable, I believe.

The advantage is the independence of these two problems, so I believe we 
can start experimenting right now.  I can add this functionality to the 
Speech Dispatcher backend as soon as the locale information within the 
ACSS attributes provides some reasonable values.  Currently I prefer to 
ignore this information, since it always contains 'english', but it 
makes sense to switch the default language according to current locale 
(most of the text produced by Orca is in the current locale's language).

So if Orca sets the locale information to the current locale by default 
and changes it for any part of speech to a different language, Speech 
Dispatcher will respect that.  This way Orca could for example set the 
locale according to the locale of the current application being accessed 
or of a web page being viewed.

Hope this makes sense.  Tomas