[Kde-accessibility] Speech Dispatcher, KDE, dcop, and perlbox

[Luke Yelavich]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 10:53:49AM EST, Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> On Monday 21 November 2005 09:51 am, david powell wrote:
> > i ask as i have been having a look at perlbox , thats a speech to text and
> > text to speech, it suppots kde , but does not seem to intigrate with kttsd
> > and drives festival directly , the tts side has all the /dev/dsp problems
> > that not using arts/alsa/gestreamer normaly gets ,just think that it would
> > beinifit from beeing able to use kttsd in kde , but thay try and suport
> > other xwindows managers , and there is a console mode for non x ,
> > with speech to text in some ways beeing another accessibility reqiuirement
> > for some  there are some forms of disability that it would be a very usefull 
> addition
> 
> We need yet another TTS system like we need a hole in our heads.
> 
> As for audio.  Frankly the situation is a mess.  As Hynek Hanke recently put 
> it, NONE of the existing audio frameworks is really suitable for 
> accessibility TTS.  ALSA suffers from poor documentation and mixing problems.  
> aRts has its problems and of course is dependent on KDE.  GStreamer has high 
> latency (and to make matters worse, the latest releases are ABI incompatible 
> with earlier releases).  NAS and NMM also have problems.  Hynek could 
> probably give a more detailed and accurate list of the problems than I.
> 
> The freestandards.org Accessibility Group drafted a set of accessibility audio 
> requirements and Olaf presented it at aKademy 2005.  Unfortunately, I think 
> like 2 people attended the talk, so the requirements haven't received wide 
> recognition.  Most of the multimedia framework guys are concentrating on 
> playing music and videos and aren't really thinking much about our needs.  I 
> don't think the situation will improve anytime soon.

I just thought I would join in here. Myself and others from the Ubuntu 
project are looking at doing som extra work on improving Ubuntu's 
accessibility. I guess the recommendations are not trivial, but is there 
anywhere that I can find this information as I am meeting with a few 
others later this week about what we would like to do accessibility wise 
for Ubuntu.

> My personal opinion is that ALSA is our best hope.  Most of the other 
> multimedia frameworks work with ALSA, the ALSA guys claim that the dmix 
> problems are finally solved in the latest versions, and if someone could 
> clean up the documentation problem..
> 
> But actually, I'm just tired of struggling with audio issues.  I want to 
> expend my energy solving accessibility problems; not solving multimedia 
> framework problems.

Another issue to consider is the use of hardware speech synthesizers. I 
am well aware that more people these days use software speech, however 
there are many of us who prefer to use hardware speech, for a few 
reasons. Have you thought of the best way for implementing support for 
that?

My personal feeling is to use SD again, and write hardware synth modules 
to work with hardware speech synths. Then a desktop environment 
independant configuration suite could be developed for easy 
configuration from either the console, KDE, or GNOME.

Apologies if I may sound a bit ahead of myself here, but I also do 
believe that SD is the better way to go.

Luke