Re: Montreal Summit

[meg ford <meg387 gmail com>]

Hi Cesar,

Yes, the backends do not currently support it, they only support sending named icons. Please contact them though.
Best,
Meg

On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Cesar Mauri <cesar crea-si com> wrote:

Hi Meg,

El 13/10/2011 1:56, meg ford escribió:

      Thinking in people with language and communication disorders

       (i.e. people not able to read/write due to cognitive/mental
       disorders), it would be interesting to have a IM client able to
       compose, send and display messages made up pictograms + text.
       So, messages would look like this:

       http://1.bp.blogspot.com/___h4z60kN9fAk/TBnOIM61kUI/__AAAAAAAAAQ8/TM0fBXcTvyA/s1600/__cumplea%C3%B1os.png

       <http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_h4z60kN9fAk/TBnOIM61kUI/AAAAAAAAAQ8/TM0fBXcTvyA/s1600/cumplea%C3%B1os.png>

       Also, it would be useful to add TTS support in order to hear
       messages written in plain text (which could be also useful for
       blind people).

       There had been some efforts in that way:

       http://www.fundmaresme.com/messengervisual/


   I will bring this up with the IM developers when they meet, and tell
   them that it was your suggestion. It sounds like a very promising
   idea to me, and if there is interest, I will be willing to help with
   it, as well. It could also be a useful tool for Sugar to have, so
   that children who are learning to read could communicate easily.


       but unfortunately only designed to work on an intranet and now
       abandoned :-(

       Furthermore, am I the author of a11y projects. If you have
       interest I would provide further details.


   Certainly! I will contact you and let you know what the  IM
   developers have to say.

 I spoke to one of the developers of Telepathy about this, and here is
what he said:

Currently Telepathy does not support this type of feature. For example,
users cannot send emoticons that they have drawn themselves. Therefore,
you would need to write a library for this. If you are willing to write
a library, they would be happy to have this feature.

Secondly, they recommend that you write a seperate app for this feature,
but use the Empathy contact list. They recommend that the feature be
accessed through the accessibility menu.

Lastly, if you would like to discuss this, please contact the developers
on the mailing list: telepathy@lists.freedesktop.org

<mailto:telepathy@lists.freedesktop.org>.

I hope that this is helpful. Please let me know if you have any
questions, and if you do begin work on this, I will be happy to be of
assistance if I can

Sincerely,
Meg Ford

Thanks for this feedback and for your assistance offer, but now we're not in the position to start a new development front. Anyway I'll contact the developers mailing list to, a least, leave the request and ask whether the backends support this feature.

Something else that you may like to look at is the FreeIconToSpeech wiki. They had an alpha release but it looks like development stopped at that point. You may find that there are members of the OLPC/Sugar community who are interested in the type of project you are discussing.

Best,
Meg