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

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

On 8/29/14, Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree whatever we do we shouldn't leave a number of applications in
the lurch with an unmaintained dependency. That is exactly the point I
was making in my prior post in which I pointed out that Orca isn't the
only application that can or would benefit from overhauling speech
Dispatcher or replacing it with something else. If we can upgrade
Speech Dispatcher to have better support I am all for that. I happen
to own a number of commercial speech systems and if I can be of some
assistance in overhauling Speech dispatcher's support for them let me
know.

> Ultimately, if we have to break API and ABI compatibility, that's 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.

Agreed. It might be a bit hectic at first if we have to break API
compatibility, but fortunately if we figure out where we are going
this only needs to be done once. However, hopefully Speech Dispatcher
can be fixed without breaking API compatibility too badly.

> 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.

Okay, I am game. I'll join the Speech Dispatcher list and see if my
talents may be of use to you guys. Something definitely needs to be
done with Speech Dispatcher support, and overhauling it is much better
than starting over from scratch. Plus as I mentioned above I happen to
have some commercial speech systems so I'll be able to do development
and testing on those assuming we want to devote time and energy into
supporting more commercial text to speech systems.