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

[Bill Haneman]

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 15:20, Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> 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.

There's no speech-to-text capability there either, but we do have GOK
which may be useful to this fellow's sister.

dasher might be useful too, and I believe you can run it on KDE without
AT-SPI support, for text entry/dictation.

Bill

> 
> 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.
> 
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