[Kde-accessibility] Text-to-Speech from OOo and Browsers

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <200609011228.13904.ebischoff at nerim.net>,
   Éric Bischoff <ebischoff at nerim.net> wrote:

> I think that we could all put our knowledge together and work an
> accessibility support in OpenOffice.org.

A long time ago, on a different platform (Acorn/RISC OS), I wrote a TTS
engine.  This was used by various application software such as word
processors and email/news clients to provide features such as: 'speak
text from cursor position onwards', and 'speak current paragraph', as
well as 'speak selected text'.

I now mostly use a Linux/KDE system, but I don't find these features. 
In OpenOffice.org and FireFox, if I want to speak text then I must
first select it, copy to the clipboard, and then click on the KTTS
panel icon and select "Speak from Clickboard" from its menu.  That is a
lot more cumbersome than just a single click in the text window plus an
icon-click or key-press to invoke a speak function in the Word
Processor or Browser.

Selecting the required text can sometimes be tricky, and sometimes
catches unwanted blocks of advert or sidebar text.

It has other disadvantages compared to a more speech aware application.

For example, a fact that text is a header line is lost when it's copied
to the clipboard. Since it usually doesn't end with a punctuation mark,
it's spoken run together with the following text as a single sentence. 
The same applies to image captions in a browser.

A more aware application would enforce sentence breaks after header
lines and paragraphs, and between list items, and around captions and
other separate information.

It could also do useful things like vary the voice for italic or
block-quoted text or the different quoting levels in an email. This
reproduces in sound useful information which is available visually.

I use speech output for proof-reading and just generally listening to
text which I often prefer to reading.  But I'm sure these points are
even more important to people with poor vision. 

I'm not certain how the system works, but I believe that Speech
Dispatcher acts as a common interface for applications that want to use
speech output?

Do word processor and browser applications intend to provide these
improved speech output features?