[Kde-accessibility] KoSpeaker

[Gary Cramblitt]

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