Re: eSpeak support in Orca -- what is the best way?

[Tomas Cerha <cerha brailcom org>]

Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> * Speech Dispacher support for Orca -- I know there have been issues 
> raised about this before. Some missing features are mentioned here: 
> http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SpeechDispatcher

Hello, the major issue now is the missing callback support.  This
results in missing cursor/speech synchronization.  As far as I know, the
end user will notice that in OpenOffice when reading the whole document
-- when he interrupts the speech, the cursor will not be positioned to
the place where the speech was interrupted.  Maybe there are some other
situation, may someone comment on that?

Adding this support into the Speech Dispatcher Orca backend should not
be technically difficult (my rough estimation is 40 manhours, being
tempted to say much less).

Well, once we get the functionality to the Orca backend, we will also
need to support it in the Speech-Dispatcher eSpeak driver.  The author
of eSpeak added an API for that recently.  Maybe Hynek or Jonathan will
tell us more about the progress here.

> I do  wonder how the user community would react to a sudden switch of
> default synth though. Thoughts?

Please also note, that Dpeech Dispatcher allows you to switch
synthesizers automatically based on the current language, so you should
be able to use e.g. Festival for English and eSpeak for other languages.
 This, however, must be supported by the client (i.e. Orca) by providing
relevant language information.

Hope this information helps.

Tomas.