Re: Talking daisy reader.

[Peter Korn <peter korn sun com>]

Hi Thomas,

> Well, for the moment I'm just doing basic research, and above all 
> comparing apis and languages. Java actually
> seams like the better choice at this point for a variety reasons.
> As you mentioned deployment alone might give me a vary good reason to 
> build it in java. The daisy reader could be designed so that it would be 
> platform independant and run on Mac, Linux, windows, etc.
> Daisy readers tend to use a web browser such as Internet
> Explorer for html document display etc. Using the java web client api 
> for Mozilla in theory might be able to perform a similar function under 
> Gnome. Another good lead is possably using xerces 2.30 from apache for 
> xml parsing. It's going to take me a few months to really decide where to 
> go with this, but a Daisy reader for  Unix is badly needed by myself and 
> several other blind Unix users. Especially, one that supports Daisy 2
> and Daisy 3.

Another route to consider for HTML rendering (especially if you use Java to
write the Daisy reader) is the Swing HTML classes.  The HTMLEditorKit
provides a lot of support for rendering (and editing) HTML in a Swing
JTextComponent.  The JavaHelp facility uses these objects, and Gnopernicus'
interactions with JavaHelp should give a good indication of how it would
work with reading HTML from Daisy rendered in Swing.

Alternately, you can use the libraries in Java for getting and parsing the
HTML, but render that directly yourself.

An issue that has come up in the Windows world that we haven't yet really
addressed in GNOME is that of "self-voicing applications".  How should
Gnopernicus interact with a talking Daisy reader?  Certainly if the reader
doesn't render directly in Braille, a Braille user of Gnopernicus may want
to not have Daisy talk itself.  Likewise, a speech user of Gnopernicus may
want to let Daisy do most (all?) of the talking.  I'd be very curious about
your thoughts on this.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Korn" <peter korn sun com>
> To: "Thomas Ward" <slingshooter valkyrie net>
> Cc: <gnome-accessibility-list gnome org>
> Sent: Monday, March 17, 2003 10:35 AM
> Subject: Re: Talking daisy reader.
> 
> > Hi Thomas,
> >
> > I think it really depends upon where you want to deploy your Daisy reader.
> > If you only want to see it running on desktop machines in a GNOME
> > environment, then absolutely use gnome-speech.  On the other hand, looking
> > forward to the next two generations of PDA and cell phones, I would expect
> > that we might start seeing phones running J2SE and support the Java Speech
> > API and FreeTTS.
> >
> > Are you in touch with George Kershner on this Daisy project you're
> > considering doing?  If not, I encourage you to contact him and let him
> know
> > what you're thinking.
> >
> >
> > Either way you go, I'm delighted to hear you're looking into this.  It'd
> be
> > very nice to have a Daisy reader on the UNIX desktop.
> >
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Peter Korn
> > Sun Accessibility team
> >
> > > Hi, list. I'm a little at an impass how  I should proceed with a couple
> > > of projects I've been conciddering writing. I've been thinking about
> > > writing a talking daisy reader for gnome, and it has to be self voicing.
> > > I would like to either use C++ with the gnome-speech libraries, or use
> > > Java with  JSAPI, and the FreeTTS synthesizor.
> > > Any suggestions one which might be the better way to go? I have
> > > gnome-speech  built installed, and working, but no api documentation how
> > > to develope with it which sort of puts me at a disadvantage.
> > > If I had my choice per say I'd like to build the app in C/C++ and the
> > > gnome-speech api, but I could in theory go either way.
> > > With so many electronic books  being put out by RFBND, NLS, Book Share,
> > > etc in the daisy 2 and 3 for mats I was hoping to put my free time into
> > > building a reader which would run under Gnome which could read these
> > > electronic text books.
> > > Thanks, for any suggestions.
> > >
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