kde and speech

[Jeremy Whiting]

Hi Gustav,

On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 5:23 AM, Gustav Degreef <gustav97 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/11/2017 11:58 PM, Jeremy Whiting wrote:
> > Jovie is not a screen reader. It is only useful to speak notifications
> > from clock, etc.
> snip
> >  Orca is the recommended screen reader on plasma systems.
> Perhaps Jovie is not technically a screen reader, but it is well
> integrated into Okular and some other KDE applications.   In PDF files,
> with Okular I select the text and right click.  A context menu opens
> that has an option to read out the text.  In other applications, like
> the browser, word processor or e-mail client, I just select the text,
> then right click the Jovie icon in the system tray, and select the
> option to read out the selected text, stop reading, etc.  I am seriously
> visually impaired for more than 3 years, Jovie in a sense has saved my
> life.  I tried four years back to integrate Orca into my KDE desktop and
> I found it too difficult and cumbersome.
>
> It would be very helpful to know where instructions are that describe
> how to integrate Orca into KDE and use it as easily as Jovie can be
> used.  A number of people who hear the output of Jovie comment that the
> voices are terrible.  It would be great if Orca is a good replacement
> with better sounding voices.   Gustav.
>

I'm glad Jovie has been helpful for you. I need an excuse to get back into
KDE development again, this might be just the thing to get me there. Can I
ask you a few questions to make sure the stuff I add/suggest is usable for
you quickly?

1. What distribution of linux are you using with Jovie?
2. Which version of that distribution are you running?

I am very confident I can create functionality in plasma or try with orca
to get the functionality that you are used to. Orca and Jovie both use
Speech-Dispatcher to do the speech synthesis which uses espeak by default
but can be easily changed to use mbrola which sounds slightly better or
pico (the same voices from Android) if pico is available on your
distribution. Once I know the distribution you are using I can guide you
through setting up Jovie/Speech-dispatcher to use these better quality
voices then see what we need to do to get orca working well also and/or the
Jovie "speak text from clipboard" functionality in plasma itself using
QtSpeech.

thanks,
Jeremy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-accessibility/attachments/20171012/291fe3b3/attachment.html>