[Kde-accessibility] KoSpeaker
Gary Cramblitt
garycramblitt at comcast.net
Sat Nov 26 02:58:45 CET 2005
I have committed a new Text-to-Speech (TTS) capability to KOffice svn. There
is a new object, lib/kofficecore/KoSpeaker.cpp, which is created in
lib/kofficecore/komainwindow.cc, and therefore is created in all KO apps
(except Kexi). By default, the TTS feature is off. In KWord, you can go to
Configure KWord to activate it.
The object adds a kinda screen reader capability to all KO apps. It can speak
the text of widgets under the mouse pointer and/or widgets that have the
focus. It also adds a "Speak Text" option in the context menu of the KWord
Document Structure Area, which is useful for speaking a document. Note that
this capability is *not* intended for completely blind users. Instead, it is
intended for users with other visual disabilities. I would like feedback as
to whether this feature is useful. In particular, I would like to hear from
anyone with visual disabilities.
This capability will be removed when KO is converted to KDE4, where hopefully
we will have a proper screen reader using the Assistive Technology - Service
Provider Interface.
The capability mostly works (at least for me), but there are a few problems:
1. Cannot speak menu items under the mouse pointer in a QMenuBar (the main
menu).
2. Doesn't support all kinds of widgets.
The code is quite a hack, so unless there is positive feedback, I may decide
to remove it from the 3.5 final product.
To try it, you'll need to
1. Build KOffice from svn.
2. Install KTTSD from 3.4 or 3.5 kdeaccessibility module. Configure with a
suitable synth engine. A really lightweight English-only synth is Festival
Lite (flite), but Festival is a good choice in general.
I haven't yet added configuration pages to the other KO apps, but if you want
to test it under those apps now, you can add a section like this to the
corresponding rc file in $HOME/.kde/share/config
[TTS]
AcceleratorPrefixWord=Accelerator
PollingInterval=600
SpeakAccelerators=true
SpeakDisabled=true
SpeakFocusWidget=false
SpeakPointerWidget=true
SpeakTooltips=true
SpeakWhatsThis=true
SpeakPointerWidget and SpeakFocusWidget true enable speaking of the widget
under the mouse pointer and speaking the focused widget respectively.
--
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php
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