Re: gnopernicus, not what i thought it was

[Peter Korn <peter korn sun com>]

Hi Michael, Sam,

Michael Meeks wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-07-20 at 11:50, Sam Halliday wrote:
> > what i was looking for was a program (probably best implemented as an 
> > applet) which when clicked, would read the currently selected text and 
> > [more complicated] to have maybe some form of grammatical (not just 
> > spelling) checker. options to change speech parameters would also be
> > nice.
> 
>         Right; that should be pretty easy.
> 
> > does such a program already exist? grammatical checker aside, this 
> > should really be quite a trivial program to code up, and i may attempt 
> > it myself; although with many other things on and learning gnome2 
> > programming from scratch, this may take me a loooong time.
> 
>         Well - I guess what you need to do is grab at-spi/test/simple-at,
> grunge that into the panel applet example, add
> gnome-speech/test/test-foo and you're pretty much there ;-)
> Unfortunately, the massive range of impairments means that it's unlikely
> for us to be able to provide a perfect solution for everyone out of the
> box [ I think ].

Michael is right on the money here.  The folks who designed and built the
GNOME Accessibility framework focused on the hardest problems, on the
assumption that the easier ones would be pretty solvable once we'd done the
hardest ones (namely blind/deaf, the most severe physical disabilities, and
the stuff needed for full voice control).  The architecture provides all of
the information you need to build the tool you describe, and the source code
in simple-at and the examples in gnome-speech should provide the stuff you
need.  You may also find things of interest in the gnopernicus source code,
though that is a much larger body of code to work through to find the
specific gems you might be looking for.

I know of no one else working on quite the thing you describe, so I would
encourage you to consider starting a new project around it!


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team