Re: [orca-list] Feature request: Orca should have a hotkey to change speech language.

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

On 12/28/2012 05:44 PM, Alex Midence wrote:
> I would also welcome a feature that would let me change languages
> in a very few key strokes.  I write in English and Spanish mostly though
> I've been known to use other languages form time to time.

A few hours ago I committed a change that gets us half way there. It
adds a new, unbound command to cycle amongst profiles. So I have my
default profile which is English, and my "Spanish" profile, and now I
can quickly cycle between them. As a result, if I were sent an email in
Spanish, I could read it with the Spanish synthesizer. Then toggle back
to English to read the next email. That's the good news, and hopefully
addresses the most needed use case for this feature request.

The tricky thing, which I've not yet implemented, is getting Orca to
start presenting messages in the new language. That's easy enough to do
for, say, character names so that when I arrow to a period in the
aforementioned email, Orca says "punto" instead of dot. But if I want
Orca to tell me it switched to the Spanish profile in Spanish rather
than saying English words with the Spanish synth, I currently have to
reload the default script, and that currently will have a side effect of
commands showing up in the Preferences dialog in one language, and the
rest of the GUI remaining in the default language but spoken in the
other language. Not to mention dogs and cats living together, and
similar untoward things.

As a result, I want to ponder what strings need to be in the new locale,
what strings need to remain in the original locale, etc., etc. After I
do that, I'll make the necessary changes. If the changes are huge, then
I'll add a characters names hack in the meantime. But I've not done that
yet.

Stay tuned!
--joanie