Re: [orca-list] Speech in general (Re: Capital, Capital, Capital)

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

> As a way to move forward, I think we might need to fill out the desires 
> above and see what can be done to address them.  The TTSAPI work does 
> some of this, but I'll admit it was done before I had a better 
> understanding of the screen reader problem: 
> http://www.freebsoft.org/tts-api.
>   
Hi Willie,

this is not a problem. The TTS API and the extended SSML specification
is not a frozen thing. Rather, we should continue to revise it and
modify it according to our needs and understandings so that it
is a good and up-to-date guide for our efforts to implement
the speech backend.

For example the better definition of "punctuation some" that
you mention via a list of included punctuation characters has already
been thought about and it is included in the API. I'm however sure there
are still things we didn't think about and that are still not there.

If you have any new comments and questions, it would be good
to talk about them and perhaps to change/update the document.

You are very right in saying that there are many situations, where
the context known by the screen reader is important, and where the
synthesizer can't decide on the proper handling of the text based
on the text alone. I believe the proper solution for these cases is
that the screen reader tag how the text should be read via
appropriate marks, but leave the tasks of actually doing it to
the TTS.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke