integrated text to speech was Re: key bindings

[Mark Gray <markgray iago nac net>]

Calum Benson <calum.benson@sun.com> writes:
> Mark Lehrer wrote:
>> 
>> Gnome has a severe shortage of key bindings in just about every
>> application.
>> 
>> Is anyone working on this yet?
> 
> As a related aside, I believe one of the tasks that Sun are hoping to
> get involved with now we're on board as part of the GNOME Foundation is
> making GNOME accessible to users with disabilities.  In the case of
> those who are unable to use a mouse, this will mean making making
> *everything* accessible in a consistent way from the keyboard...

Sorry to change the subject, but since you brought up the
accessibility issue I just wanted to bring up a project that I am in
the process of getting up to speed on -- the (optional) integration of
text to speech technology into gnome.  Is there anyone else on the
list interested in such a project?  At present I am leaning towards
using the developing W3.org standard:

Linkname: Speech Synthesis Markup Language Specification for the
          Speech Interface Framework
     URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis

and hack in hooks to gnome/gtk/gdk to produce the markup when text is
displayed or typed and feed that to a text to speech engine such as
rsynth-2.0.  There is a product for M$ Windows named JAWS which my
mother and father use, and it provides remarkably useful feedback even
to a sighted individual.  With access to all the source code I think
we can do an even better job of it.