Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 02:58:02PM AEST, Thomas Ward wrote:
> Bottom line, I think we as end users have a choice where to go with
> this. One, we can build that support, a Python module, directly into
> Orca which means any other text to speech application can not and will
> not benefit from our work, or two, we can write a new speech service
> that replaces Speech Dispatcher. In other words if we don't like the
> current mousetrap build a new one. I myself would be in favor of
> writing a new speech service which replaces or upgrades Speech
> Dispatcher with something that offers more direct and better support
> for Espeak, Festival, Cepstral, Dectalk, etc while being separate from
> Orca. That way other apps and screen readers can share the new speech
> service. It could essentially be a new version of Gnome Speech, but be
> more universally shared among desktop and console applications. Any
> thoughts?

This could still be done under the speech-dispatcher project. Speech Dispatcher is in bad need of some 
overhaul, and this has been on my mind for months. I have been planning to write up a preliminary roadmap to 
move things forward, but unfortunately due to life and work issues in the past months since taking up Speech 
Dispatcher maintainership, I haven't been able to do much more than apply a few patches and ask a few 
questions about user issues.

Speech Dispatcher is used by many other applications outside of the assistive technology community, from 
various messaging and voice communications applications, to GPS applications, to KDE applications for reading 
contents of documents out loud. I would prefer to keep improving Speech Dispatcher, such that those projects 
are not left in the lurch with an unmaintained dependency.

Ultimately, if we have to break API and ABI compatibility, thats what we have to do, but I am hoping we can 
avoid doing so, and at least its only open source projects that are depending on Speech Dispatcher thus far, 
so we can help them update to any new API we end up implementing.

I invite you all to join the Speech Dispatcher mailing list (1), so that all these issues can be discussed, 
and plans can be made to fix them. In the mean time, there is a new bugfix release of Speech Dispatcher in 
the works, so I am sure various distro packagers will jump on that soon enough and package it up.

I accept that you all want the best possible performance from your speech experience with Orca, and should 
you go ahead and write a direct eSpeak driver for Orca, I won't have a problem with that at all, that is the 
great thing about open source, diversity and choice. Hopefully in the not too distant future, Speech 
Dispatcher will be up to the challenge of providing the best speech experience available on *Nix with both 
Orca, and console applications.

Luke