[Kde-accessibility] KoSpeaker

[Peter Korn]

Hi Gary,

Glad to see this functionality coming into KOffice.  Instead of removing it in 
KDE 4, please instead consider how it might be extended/changed for various 
learning disabilities, such as dyslexia.  Products like TextHelp for Windows 
add in reading functionality in MS-Office, with additional features like 
highlighting words as spoken.  This is useful functionality, and something of 
interest even in a world with good AT-SPI functionality.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> 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.
>