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

From: kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>
To: Hadi Rezaee <hadirezaei gmx com>, orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 01:59:18 -0500

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hi
I know of this one. It has something to do with period symbols,
followed by an underline, followed by a 0. It makes eloquence announce
that as D O T H U N D R E D followed by whatever you're listening to.
It turns ._2 to D O T H U N D R E D T W E N T Y , ./._3 into ... etc.
This is closed source software, and I don't see this ever getting
fixed. I hate to be a bearer of bad news, but this is precisely why
some of  us have switched over to espeak, because of eloquence's
issues that just will not ever get fixed. This might be a
speech-dispatcher  thing, or it could be eloquence itself. I've been
working for, I think, about a year and a half, maybe 2 years, trying
very painstakingly, to get espeak's US english up to snuff, and it's
mostly there. It does have some issues that have more to do with
rules, how espeak interprets teh text, which I'm still struggling
with. But it's usable now. IT was tons worse when I first started. I
now keep eloq around mostly to throw words at, or in case espeak
breaks horribly, which does happen occasionally.


On 08/29/2014 01:41 AM, Hadi Rezaee wrote:

I just wanted to send a mail and  Upvote what thomas said I have
purchaced voxin because I really can't go along with espeak, and it
is extremely terrible when reading package names. I'm just a new
user to linux, but just wanted to mention that the punctuation
thingy is badly broken with elequence and orca.

On 8/29/2014 11:06 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

_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing
list orca-list gnome org 
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list 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

Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find
out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing
list orca-list gnome org 
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list 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

Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp

Follow-Ups:
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Luke Yelavich
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Alex Midence

References:
- [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Storm Dragon
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Kyle
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Mike Ray
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Luke Yelavich
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Storm Dragon
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Thomas Ward
- Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)
  - From: Hadi Rezaee

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