Hardware synths was Re: Mozilla - like JAWS or like Hal?

["Tom and Esther Ward" <tward1978 earthlink net>]

Hi, Janina.
I would certainly like to take on the job of writing hardware drivers for
gnome-speech, but the problem is getting my hands on the various synths for
testing.
the Doubletalk line of synths would be probably easy to support as RC
Systems has good development documentation. I have also got lots of
documentation on the Dectalk Express line of synths.
My problem is that I don't know anyone who can sell or lend a synth like
that for the time it would take to write, debug, test, and commit the
drivers.
Do you know of such a way to get ahold of low-cost or lending synths in
order to write the drivers?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Janina Sajka" <janina rednote net>
To: "gnome-accessibility-list" <gnome-accessibility-list gnome org>
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: Mozilla - like JAWS or like Hal?


> I want to strongly second the request for hardware speech synth support. I
doubt that hardware synths will again become the device of choice for most
users, but they will continue to be preferred by a significant minority. May
I advise that the problem of keeping the speech synthesizer out of the
musician's current composition is a very frequent topic on the MIDI-Mag
(blind musicians) list? Hardware just makes that task easier.
>
> I do suspect, however, that figuring out how best to go baoutspeech
support in the complete environment needs to be discussed widely. Of course,
the same holds for braille. We have users of Speakup, and Brltty, and Yasr,
and Emacspeak, and now an emerging graphical environment. Often these are
the same users switching among environments as their needs change from
moment to mement. We need to turn this fact into an advantage for the open
source environment. Resolving issues around sharing these I/O devices is
listed by the Free Standards Accessibility Workgroup as a goal for just this
reason.
>
> But, what is the appropriate solution? In braille it seems the issue is
mostly licensing. There's one discussion thread.
>
> In speech it may yet get to licensing, but it's not to that point yet
because we're only beginning the technical discussions.
>
> Should gnome-speech be extended to support hardware devices and console AT
such as Emacspeak and Speakup? As I understand it this creates issues for
Speakup because interrupts on hw devices are so inconsistently used.
>
> What about Speech Dispatcher? It now seems quite certain that Speakup will
support software speech via Speech Dispatcher. But I don't see emacspeak
development moving toward Speech Dispatcher, even though that was the
original AT for which BrailleCom created Speech Dispatcher.
>
> I have no answers--but wanted to lay out some of the issues more
completely because this topic is important.
>
> Jason White writes:
> > Shaun Oliver writes:
> >  > one thing I would like to see is support for hardware synthesisers,
as I
> >  > am far from  being a programmer of any kind, I can't implement such
> >  > support.
> >  > this would assist people in many wais ie. being able to fidd
> >
> > I have a DECTALK Express here, and I know I should write a
> > Gnome-speech driver for it. The problem is that I don't expect to have
> > time to write it in the near future.
> >
> > Another option worth considering would be to write a driver that runs
> > Emacspeak speech servers; these exist for a variety of hardware
> > synthesizers.
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
> --
>
> Janina Sajka, Director
> Technology Research and Development
> Governmental Relations Group
> American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
>
> Email: janina afb net Phone: (202) 408-8175
> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>