[Kde-accessibility] Fwd: Re: paraphlegic KDE support

[Gary Cramblitt]

I'm forwarding a message I received along with my reply and his reply back.  
If anyone can supply this person with more information, please do so.

I wondered about speech-to-text capabilities in Gnome, but the Gnome 
accessibility webpage didn't seem to have any information.

Thanks.
Gary

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: paraphlegic KDE support
Date: Wednesday 22 February 2006 10:52
From: Gary Cramblitt <garycramblitt at comcast.net>
To: Fabio Zottele <fabio.zottele at ing.unitn.it>

On Tuesday 21 February 2006 03:12, you wrote:
> Hi I am Fabio Zottele and I work in the University of Trento, Italy. I
> have a sister that is paraplecic (legs) and she uses programs like
> ViaVoice and Dragon Naturally Speaking for dictate to a text editor,
> because using fingers is painful for her too.
> I would know if there is a kde application similar to ViaVoice or is
> planned to be in future.
> She is very enthusiastic of a solution like linux-kde on her computer
> (she still uses WindowsXP) because of her computer is still performant,
> but the use of Dragon is very expensive (both on money and RAM and CPU
> consumption too). She tried KDE on my laptop and she is enthusiastic for
> the appeal and the Open Sorce Way-of-Thinking that finds it more
> "ethic". So we will give a little support to KDE-Accessibility paying
> the equivalent of her Dragon Naturally...licence to KDE_Accessibility.
> Let me know how to do!
>
> Thank you for your work and thank you for your attention too.

Speech-to-text (STT) is not my area of expertise, but I'll try to answer your
question.

KDE 3.5 does not have a STT capability similar to ViaVoice.  There is a
rudimentary speech command capability in the KHotKeys module in the KDE
Control Center, but this is nowhere near as capable as ViaVoice and it is not
designed for text entry.

There is an open source STT program called Sphinx.  I have never personally
tried it, but I'm told it works pretty well.  I don't know if it supports
Italian.  How well it integrates with KDE is another matter.

Thank you for the offer of financial support.  If you wish to contribute to
KDE please see this web page:

http://kde.org/support/

I would like to forward your email to the kde-accessibility mailing list.
Perhaps someone there can give you a better answer.  May I forward your
email?

Regards
--
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php

-----------------

Thank you for answering me.
Forward my e-mail to anyone could be interested in such projects.
It doesn't really matter if a project like Via Voice will start or how 
long it will take.
The important thingh for me and my sister is that THERE ACTUALLY is an 
alternative to Windows and commercial products (I personally don't hate 
windows, but I love alternatives in life), and these alternatives are 
for people with handicaps. My sister and I will support LINUX+KDE, not 
for a philantropic cause but because we still believe that one day 
people with "less-ability-person" will do the things they want like 
everyone "normal-ability" and we appreciate the way KDE is realizing 
this "vision".

Thankyou (GRAZIE!)

Mara and Fabio Zottele.