[Kde-accessibility] Proklam and KMouth

[Gunnar Schmi Dt]

Hello,

On Monday 23 September 2002 21:57, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Pupeno said:
> > [...]
> > As I said in another mail... I expect as little as posible from
> > the TTS, that's why Proklam does a lot of parsing and
> > preprocessing. I think this will allow me to use as many
> > TTSs as posible.
>
> What we found in discussions with assistive technology engineers
> was that good accessibility requires some fairly advanced features,
> or at least better than lowest-common-denominator.  But by doing
> all the complexity in the front-end, as you suggest, you lost the
> ability to use powerful TTS backend features, and you probably
> increase latency (which is a big issue for accessibility).
> [...]
I think it would be best if Proklam would use a rich-feature plug in inte=
rface=20
but with the possibility that a plug in may say that it does not support =
a=20
particular frature. In that case Proklam would emulate that feature.

The gnome-speech plug in would then either tell Proklam the abilities of =
the=20
configured TTS system or it would act as a rich-featured plug in that its=
elf=20
emulates unsupported features.

> I think the big difference here is that you have decided to fix both th=
e
> front and back ends of your architecture, which is very limiting if you
> are trying to make flexible plugins.  The gnome-speech architecture is
> not really suitable as a lowest-common-denominator back-end, it is a
> rich-featured "front end".
>
> In gnome-speech we do not have a single back-end API, we use the APIs
> available to us from the TTS engines.  If you did likewise with Proklam
> you would be able to access the extended features you mention much more
> readily.  My suggestion is that the front ends of the two architectures
> should be made as similar as possible. for a number of reasons.
>
I think implementing a plug in interface is reasonable for being able bot=
h to=20
develop support for TTS systems without the need to change the implementa=
tion=20
of Proklam and to being able to compile Proklam when you do not have all=20
supported TTS systems installed. (How does gnome-speech do that without a=
=20
plug in interface?)

Gunnar Schmidt