[Kde-accessibility] Proklam and KMouth

[Peter Korn]

Hi Gunnar,

Good to hear about your KMouth project to provide augmentative communication 
functionality in the Linux environment.  There are quite a few special 
purpose devices which do this today in the commercial world, and I'd bet that 
a number of those companies would be very interested in supporting and 
re-packaging a general purpose Linux solution.

I highly recommend you check out the GNOME Accessibility work (see 
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap).  The GNOME community is developing 
a rich accessibility infrastructure on top of the GNOME 2 library stack, 
including the GNOME Accessibility Service Provider Interface (which should 
really perhaps be called the GNU Accessibility Service Provider Interface) 
which is used by several assistive technologies (such as Gnopernicus - the 
GNOME Screen reader/magnifier; and GOK - the GNOME On-screen Keyboard) to get 
access to all of the applications written using the GTK+ libraries, Java 
Swing libraries, as well as StarOffice and Netscape.  User-interfaces which 
support the AT SPI (either directly or through one of several bridges) would 
therefore work with these assistive technologies.

Also part of the GNOME Accessibility work is the gnome-speech project, which 
provides an API to text-to-speech engines (both software and hardware). 
gnome-speech presently has drivers for Festival, FreeTTS (a Java port of 
Flight [Festival Light]), and the ViaVoice engine (IBM's packaging of the 
Eloquence engine now distributed by SpeechWorks).  We are looking at various 
hardware synthesizers as well, such as the popular DECtalk Express.

It would be great of KMouth could work with gnome-speech, and thereby support 
all gnome-speech synthesizers.  And, especially if you are concerned about 
finding ways for users with limited physical dexterity to drive the KMouth 
interface, you might consider supporting AT SPI.  If you did, users with 
significant physical impairments who used the GNOME On-screen Keyboard, coudl 
also use KMouth.  This would thereby provide immediate access to users of 
single-switch systems, sip-puf straw devices, mouth-sticks, head-mice, and 
even eye-tracking systems.

Please don't hesitate to ask questions on this list - 
<gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org>.  You'll find a large community of 
experts here.


Regards,


Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team


Gunnar Schmi Dt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am writing a project called KMouth, which enables persons that cannot speak 
> to let their computer speak, e.g. mutal people or people who have lost their 
> voice (like my mother, who cannot control her tongue).
> 
> Among the planned features of KMouth are the possibility to select phrases 
> from (user defined) phrase books (so that regularly used phrases do only need 
> to be typed in once), and the selection of a language that is used for the 
> pronounciation (so that English phrases can be spoken with an English 
> pronounciation and German phrases can be spoken with a German pronounciation, 
> for example).
> 
> Currently the program uses a shell script for the actual text-to-speech 
> conversion. As I have seen that Proklam shall provide both an interface for 
> other progams to speak and a module in kcontrol, I would like to use Proklam 
> as standard text output system, so I don't have to deal with configuration 
> issues.
> 
> From the messages on the mailing lists, I have understood that Proklam does 
> not support more than one text-to-speech system at a time. However there are 
> some multi-lingual text-to-speech systems (e.g., Festival --- if what I have 
> heard is correct). What I have not yet found is information whether these 
> languages can be specified when letting a text be spoken.
> 
> An other issue is that you might need to use more than one tts-system in order 
> to provide all languages of your interest (for example English and German for 
> my mother). So I have basically two options:
> 
> Either I have to implement my own GUI for a multilingual text-to-speach system 
> that uses a number of simple shell scripts (one for each language), or I have 
> to find a mechanism to switch the language within Proklam. Of course I would 
> prefer the latter, as I do not wish to duplicate functionality of Proklam.
> 
> Also, as I am currently using hadifax (in combination with mbrola) as a German 
> tts system, I think about helping to write a Proklam module for hadihax.
> 
> Gunnar Schmi Dt
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