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

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hi
I could get behind this. You make a lot of points. I myself switch
between eloq and espeak at the moment, although it is mostly because
of some recent changes in espeak's US english which makes it hard to
listen to, which I'm trying to fix. The problem as I see it is again,
developer resources. The few people that know enough about any of this
stuff to actually make a difference are so busy they can barely manage
the stuff they do now, let alone add more to their plate. Unless more
people start trying to learn the various languages this stuff is
written in, and I count myself out, I can maybe learn python, if I try
hard enough, but c and c++ are just out of the question, we're going
to be stuck in this loop. Stuff needs to get done, but no one has the
time/interest/desire/whatever to do it, so nothing is done. I'm
constantly being told how the daisy format sucks, for example. It's a
blind specific format, and it's bulky, and clunky, etc. Switch to
format x. Great idea, in theory. But bookshare produces only daisy
books, and brf files, which are even harder to work with. More blind
specific software needs to be written and actually maintained, not
half written, discarded, and left  for someone else to pick up. I've
made up my mind at least. I'm going to try to learn python at least
well enough to help out orca where I can, and if I'm really lucky,
improve on that dbr (daisy book reader) fork I made but never did much
with.
Thanks
Kendell clark



On 08/29/2014 01:36 AM, Thomas Ward wrote:

Storm,

The shortcomings of Speech Dispatcher are well known to me. For
what its worth I am a software developer and an end user, and I
empathize with your and others frustrations with the current
technology. In many ways I have similar frustrations with Speech
Dispatcher but for slightly differing reasons.

Unlike some on this list I don't exclusively rely upon free
software like Espeak. I have purchased a number of commercial text
to speech systems like Dectalk, Eloquence, and Cepstral, and am
just as disappointed with Speech Dispatcher's lackluster support
for them as I am with its support for Espeak. After all, I might
even have more of a reason to gripe since I paid money for what
were supposedly better quality text to speech systems, but am
getting lackluster results because there is a definite and obvious
difference in performance with the way Orca did with those
synthesizers using Gnome Speech and the performance Orca has with
using Speech dispatcher. Its clearly a case of Speech Dispatcher
being a less desirable solution for handling speech drivers.

The point here is this. So far I have heard a few suggestions of 
adding direct support for Espeak in Orca. Basically, writing a
Espeak module that gives Orca direct control over the TTS output.
While I see where people are going with this I see two major
problems with it.

First, adding Espeak support to Orca assumes everyone uses Espeak,
and only benefits Espeak users. Anyone who happens to use something
like a commercial speech solution like Cepstral Dianne or a free
speech solution like Festival still get shorted. The developer
resolves the problem with Orca and Espeak, which is fine if one
happens to be using Espeak, but does nothing for the rest of us who
may have other preferences.

Therefore unless we are looking into the option of supporting
every speech system directly by Orca I am not in favor of
supporting Espeak directly. Its a lot of work that only supports a
single text to speech system, and there is a more effective way of
fixing the problems with Espeak without resorting to direct Espeak
support. Writing a better alternative to Speech Dispatcher may be
such a solution, and not only resolve problems with Espeak but
might offer improvements for Eloquence, Festival, Cepstral, etc as
well.

Second, adding Espeak support to Orca only helps Orca. This does
not offer a means of offering improved text to speech support to
other applications and games. If we think about Orca and only Orca 
accessibility we may in fact be shortchanging ourselves in the
long run by excluding more long term accessibility solutions.

For example, as many of you may know Microsoft Windows offers a
speech API, Sapi, which is available to any and all applications.
It is used by screen readers like Jaws, NVDA, and Window-Eyes for
traditional screen reader speech output, but is by no means limited
in scope to screen readers. Jim Kitchen, a popular author of
accessible audio games, has used Sapi to speak various things in
his games. Nextup has a number of speech enabled applications like
TextAloud, WeatherAloud, and NewsAloud that speaks the weather,
news, and various other things aloud via Sapi voices. Microsoft has
a map program that speaks driving or walking directions aloud as
well. My point being that text to speech support has many
applications besides screen readers and we should not shortchange
ourselves by focusing exclusively on Orca, and ignoring the bigger
picture here.

Yes, Speech Dispatcher has problems, and here is an opportunity to 
address that issue. Rather than including support directly into
Orca I think what we need to do is replace Speech Dispatcher with a
more stable, more reliable, API for text to speech that does
everything Sapi does for Windows users. Yeah, we can use it in Orca
for speech output, but consider developing something that can be
used in talking weather applications, news applications, e-book
readers, whatever. Plus offer support for as many free and
commercial speech engines are out there so that the user can use
what he or she wants to use rather than limiting ourselves to one
and only one text to speech system.

I know, for example, I read a lot of books. Quite a number of them
are e-books. However, when reading books I find Espeak gets on my
nerves. Espeak is alright for day to day tasks like checking mail,
writing code, or something like that but not really for reading a
good book. For that I switch over to one of the Cepstral voices
which is more human sounding, more realistic, and is the reason I
was willing to put a little money out for some higher quality
voices for Linux. Therefore if I took time out of my day to write
such a speech system I'd want to be able to be able to choose which
text to speech system I want for specific situations than
exclusively devoting all my effort into one text to speech system
which I tolerate more than like.

So to sum up my thoughts let's consider expanding this support a
bit, not focus so much on including Espeak support into Orca, and
see what we can do to come up with a better alternative to speech
Dispatcher rather than putting all or eggs in one basket with Orca
and Espeak.

On 8/27/14, Storm Dragon <stormdragon2976 gmail com> wrote:

Howdy, Nearly every other screen reader has multiple ways to
interact with speech. NVDA has a built in espeak, and the other
nonfree readers have synths as well, I think most have a built in
Eloquence. Never once, have I heard any of those users complain
that their screen reader has entirely too many ways to talk.
Also, as far as I am aware, no one has ever said "Man, I really 
wish my screen reader had to jump through layer after layer of
junk to speak." Speech-dispatcher is ok, for minimal usage, but
it crashes with alsa, has odd puctuation inconsistancies, and is
slow as molasses. The last time development of speech-dispatcher
even reached a snail's pace was when open-speech or whatever was
called was made because people weree frustrated with the lack of
progress made by speech-dispatcher. I'm not even asking to
replace spd. Let the people who like it use it. That's one thing
that makes Linux rock, there's usually more than one way to do
things. for some people, speech-dispatcher may be fine. for me,
it's falling rather short. Also, with a reliable way to deliver
speech, speech-dispatcher can drag on it its currently abysmally
slow progress, and we can have fully working espeak.
Speech-dispatcher has been around and for a long time now, and
there still not full support for espeak... No way to use
variants, and you have to hack it to use freasonably fast
espeak. Thanks Storm

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