[Kde-accessibility] Nice KTTS, but without TTS.

[Robert Vogl]

Hi there,

the subject may be provoking, but it is based on my experience with two 
popular TTS systems under Linux. One is MBrola, the other Festival.

Both are NOT part of SuSE Linux, one of the most popular distributions. I 
dont't know how the situation is with other distributions Fedorea, Debian or 
whatever. Sure, we have the option to get MBrola or Festival from the 
internet. But the installation of these packages, even to know which packages 
you will need, is really a mess and in case of Festival impossible if you 
want to keep your system consitent (caused by an infinite chain of 
dependencies of "strstream.h"). Moreover, the typical end-user will see no 
reason why he (or she) should have to install a developer environment, 
learning C and Scheme, just to get his computer speaking.

What I would like to express is that we will have a nice TTS framework for KDE 
in the near future but nobody, except skilled computer scientists, would 
benefit from it, i.e. it is simply a useless toy.

I think the  Accessibility-Group should start activities to encourage the 
authors of various TTS systems and/or the Distribution maintainers to provide 
the end-user with easy-to-install packages (and easy to configure, of 
course!). How did the Gnome people solved that problem?

Greetings,

-- 
Robert Vogl
voglrobe at web.de