Re: [orca-list] Punctuation, capital letters, exchange of characters and strings, generally error in the design of Orca

[Milan Zamazal <pdm brailcom org>]

> > > > > "WW" == Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM> writes:

    WW> My argument is that a user wants a feature and they don't care
    WW> how it is delivered.  They just want it to work.  

A user is not able to judge technical design decisions but it is
responsibility of software developers to deliver high quality results
with maximum efficiency of the software development process.  If they
don't they hurt users (although the users may not be aware of it).

    WW> My impression from Brailcom is that the speech engine itself
    WW> must provide the feature; if the engine doesn't do it, the user
    WW> must negotiate with the engine provider to get the feature
    WW> added.  

Necessary work around mechanisms can be implemented within the TTS API
framework discussed some years ago wherever the synthesizer doesn't
provide sufficient means.  This would work even without any engine
provider support (although native synthesizer support would work better)
and it would be available for all software using speech output, not only
for Orca.

To provide high quality speech output the synthesizer needs as much
information as possible (see the original message of this thread).  By
discarding information the speech output quality may get reduced.  So
this should only be done when necessary, i.e. when a particular engine
misses a particular feature.

Regards,

Milan Zamazal