[Kde-accessibility] Proklam and KMouth

[Pupeno]

=2D----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sunday 22 September 2002 11:28, Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> I could also do the German translation for Proklam once the project is
> matured and do a lot of beta testing, of course.
That would be great!

> > Pupeno wrote:
> > > An intresting project, something like what Stephen Hawking uses
> > > except that Hawking case is more challenger as he has only three
> > > movable fingers to control the system.
>
> Stephen Hawking suffers from exactly the same illness as our mother. There
> will be a point of time when she will also not be able to move more than
> three fingers, but we can alwaly do changes to the program once we see
> what exactly is needed and practical.
I'm really sorry... I hope things go as best as posible for your mother and
you (both of you and the rest of your family if any).

> > > If Festival was working, Proklam would be already speaking,
>
> I also have great problems installing the German version of Festival, but
> I managed to install the English version quite easily. What are your
> problems exactly?
My problem was a bit more complicated than that. I have Festival working, b=
ut
when I try to use it from Proklam it gives me an error, it seems it doesn't
have enough memory allocated to do the processing, then I try increasing the
memory untill Proklam takes 10 seconds to run consuming all the momery I ha=
ve
and it still doesn't work. It seems something really buggy is going on and
compilation with Proklam gives me lots, lots of warnings after I corrected
lots of errors with ugly workarround solutions. I'm going to look for an
alternative.

> > > but I don't have any problem in making a complete redising I would be
> > > very glad to redisign it with you so it would achive your needs.
>
> That's good news, but I hope a complete redesign is not necessary.
>
> Which kinds of DCOP messages do currently exist?

Well, the dcop speeking functions are three.
sayWarning, sayMessage, and sayText.
Warnings and Messages are functionallity the same, they only vary in the
importance of the message. Warnings are spoken first. Texts are special and
is for long texts. The texts are procesed and parsed before speaking so
they're spoken sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. In the middle =
of
each sentence, a check for the existance of further Warning is done, in the
middle of each paragraph a check for Messages is done (as well as Warnings).
This is very usefull for intesive use of speech capabilities (for blind
people for example), where long texts (a web page, the bible in a txt) is
spoken and you still want to know if you recive new emails (a message) or if
you computer needs to be shut down because of a power failure (a warning).
The messages to navigate thru texts are added... like a CD player, you can =
go
sentence by sentence or pargraph by paragraph to the begining or to the end.
Only one text can be in the system at a time, any amount of warning and
messages can be. Warning and messages can be removed (they're assigned a
unique ID to do this).
This text parsing system is not working yet as I'm not sure if it's going to
work with laguages like Chinese, Japanes, Hebrew, Arabic... and I want to
contact people speaking that languages to discuss this features.

> I see a number of ways for allowing Proklam to speak in different
> languages. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, so I will
> shortly describe all of them.
>
> 1st idea: A mechanism to let a plug-in know which exactly the prefered
> language is.
[...]
> 4th idea: Make it possible to load several plug-ins, and implement a
> parameter forwarding mechanism. When the program asks for special
> parameters ("language" =3D "en" and "sex" =3D "female"), then Proklam cal=
ls a
> parameter function in the default plugin. If the function returns with
> "false", then the next plugin is tried. If none of the active plugin is
> found, then the default configuration is used.
>
> Advantage: Flexible for the programs using Proklam
>
> Disadvantage: A lot of changes to Proklam

I think this is the best idea.
Changing language on the fly is a must, but changing sex on the fly doesn't
seem to be very required, most of the programs won't mind if they speak as
female or male and will let that be defined by the user. (Although... we
could end up having a particular voice/sex for some programs so Kmail would
speak as a sensual woman while Konqueror is a funny guy... let's leave it to
the future, KDE 4.0 or so, ok ? ;)
My idea is this... as you say, load more than one plug in at a time. In the
KControl module, you'll chose to add a language... so, you add the language
English and a tab or something like that for English is added, then, inside
that tab, you chose which plug in you want and which voice you want (Festiv=
al
for example, doesn't trully separate languages, but voices, you could end up
defining an spanish voice for a english), then if you add Spanish, another
tab for Spanish is added.
Appart from the disvantage that I'll have to remade all the plug in system =
of
Proklam and some other parts too and change the dcop interface to allow
specification of language, which I don't care, I mean, it's ok for me to re=
do
all this, there's another disvantage compared to my first idea that if you
have three languages they'll work in three diferent 'spaces' while if the
three of them are using Festival, it could run all in the same space, just
changing language.
But I'll stick to this last idea because that is not a tru disvantage as I
don't see anyone running more than three languages at the same time and a G=
UI
to allow to solve both problem at the same time would be imposible to use
(and imposible to program too).

> I said, I will not be able to implement any of this. These are just my
> ideas as someway who is not really a programmer, I just thought they
> might be of help.
It doesn't matter, the help is very welcome and I'll do the programming.

> I will try to install Proklam CVS in the next weeks. Do I also need to
> install HEAD to let it run?
I don't know... I'm running and developing on HEAD, so, what Proklam does,
does it on HEAD and I don't know if it would work on another version as
Proklam is not working yet and the idea is to release it with KDE (inside
KDE) in KDE 3.2.

Thank you for the feedback!
=2D --
Pupeno: pupeno@pupeno.com
http://www.pupeno.com
=2D ---
Help the hungry children of Argentina,
please go to (and make it your homepage):
http://www.porloschicos.com/servlet/PorLosChicos?comando=3Ddonar
=2D----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE9je4fLr8z5XzmSDQRArUjAKCgifh9IvNCvw5M991uEmK2NOyGLwCeOUJs
1ZgF9310zGwk+QfcCK+aeM4=3D
=3DoWLb
=2D----END PGP SIGNATURE-----