[orca-list] Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one blank space arenot recognizedin thunderbird)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

> However this isn't Thunderbird specific and indeed, Orca is throwing in 
> full stops all over the place with punctuation set to all.  I get them 
> when bringing up menus, on button labels... and all over the place where 
> none exist.
>
> Something wrong here...

The verbalized punctuation in Orca comes in after Orca has built up the 
string to send to the synthesis engine.  Thus, if Orca inserts a '.' 
when building up a string, it will be verbalized if the user has 
requested the relevant punctuation level.

Orca adds the '.' character to help with the prosody/pacing of spoken 
output as well as the fundamental pitch contour.  In this cycle, we 
added the '.' character to the end of mnemonics because we had a 
complaint: without it, the pitch of the character being spoken was 
incorrect and causing confusion.

If you'd like, you can disable the injection of the '.' character by 
adding the following lines to your ~/.orca/user-settings.py or 
~/.orca/orca-customizations.py file:

import orca.speech_generator
orca.speech_generator.PAUSE = []

Depending upon your personal preferences and how your specific speech 
engine behaves, you may or may not like the resulting speech.

In any case, we have a dilemma.  One of the best ways to get good 
prosody is to tell the speech engine where phrases start and end by 
using punctuation.  Verbalized punctuation is something that most people 
agree should be as low in the stack as possible.  At the same time, you 
have introduced a suggestion that verbalized punctuation should only 
apply to text from the application.

For the next cycle (i.e., 2.29.x), we could potentially try to devise 
something that allows us to distinguish between the text that Orca has 
generated (including punctuation) and the text that has come from the 
application.  We could then selectively apply the various filters, such 
as verbalized punctuation, to the strings.  This, of course, assumes 
that the next generation speech system, which is what Luke Yelavich at 
Canonical is working on, allows us to have this kind of control.

Will