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

[Paul Giannaros]

On Friday 01 September 2006 13:25, Jonathan Duddington wrote:
> 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. 

KTTSD provides this functionality as a plugin for Konqueror; I'm not too sure 
about KOffice but i'd imagine it'd have similar functionality.

> 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.
This is precisely what the 'rich text' feature of KTTS allows you to do. I 
believe the Konqueror KTTS plugin does this already, though I may be 
mistaken.
> 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?
>
At the moment KDE uses KTTSD which does a similar task to Speech Dispatcher - 
multitasking requests for spoken text, speech engine independence, sending 
wav files to the audio device. Applications send their text via DCOP to KTTSD 
and KTTSD takes it from there.
>
> Do word processor and browser applications intend to provide these
> improved speech output features?
>
You'd have to ask the word processor develpors and browser developers, 
especially if they are not KDE specific. As it stands Kopete and the major 
KOffice apps have support for speaking text, though i'm not sure about the 
advanced 'rich text' features.
With the proposed move to Speech Dispatcher, however, it is hoped more 
developers of other applications (KDE or not) will get on the bandwagon and 
make their application offer such features.
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