Re: Talking daisy reader.

[Thomas Ward <slingshooter valkyrie net>]

Hi, Peter. You certainly made some good points which would have to be 
conciddered before hand. Especially, how to allow someone to read daisy 
materials with a braille display.
Someone who was deaf and blind would have no other option but to use a 
braille display to access the materials. Rather reinvent the wheel by 
building all that support into the daisy reader I could leave that up to 
something such as gnopernicus to handle. However, my concern here is how 
accessible java applications built with access-swing classes on each of 
the targeted platforms.
In particular I've not kept up with state of java accessibility and 
gnopernicus. I'm aware there is some sort of java access bridge for Unix, 
but I'm not sure how to obtain it, or install it. If I were to write the 
daisy reader in java I would certainly like to have Unix version of the 
java access bridge installed, in place, so that I could do various testing 
with gnopernicus.
Another thing to concidder is while I had initially thought about using 
freetts not everyone who uses the daisy reader will like freetts and want 
to use their dectalk, viavoice, etc with it.
If you could send me some information on how to setup some sort of 
java access 
bridge under Unix it would help me design some vary simple prototype 
applications and give me a clearer idea where to go.

 On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Peter 
Korn wrote:

> 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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> > > > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > > > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
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> > >
> 
>