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

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Paul:

Paul Hunt wrote:
> thanks for the hack to cut down on the full stops!
>
> I'm a bit confused though.  How does the "break speech into chunks 
> between pauses" checkbox fit into this?

The two things are related to having to "work the system" to deal with 
the variables between speech engines.  Some speech engines treat new 
lines specially, some don't.  Some speech engines imply that a complete 
utterance (i.e., a single call to the 'speak' command) ends with a full 
stop, some don't.  Some speech engines treat multiple sentences in a 
single call to 'speak' one way, other engines treat them differently.

The result is that the same exact string being sent to different speech 
engines can end up with noticeably different pauses and fundamental 
contours.

The addition of '.' is obvious and that's what the PAUSE hack lets you 
control.

The breaking of the speech into chunks part is one that is not so 
obvious.  It ends up breaking utterances into separate calls to 'speak' 
rather than concatenating several sentences together in a single call. 
Some speech engines handle one way well, other speech engines handle the 
other way well.  Changing the 'chunks' checkbox in the GUI is the 
preferred way to control this, but you can also make a "LINE_BREAK" line 
that's similar to the PAUSE line I mentioned in the prior e-mail to 
disable the chunking.

Will

> Doesn't this control whether or not Orca inserts punctuation symbols in 
> order to create pauses that break up what it says into logical blocks?
>
> If so, I would expect that unchecking it would stop the additional 
> punctuation symbols being spoken.
>
> However, id doesn't.  So what does it do?
>
> Paul
>
> On 13/08/09 16:58, Willie Walker wrote:
> > Added as RFE http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591709 so we 
> > don't lose track.
> >
> > Willie Walker wrote:
> > > > 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
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> > > The manual is at 
> > > http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> > > The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> > > Netiquette Guidelines are at 
> > > http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines