[Kde-accessibility] KDE++ aka Polishing Existing Things - project idea

[Bob Stia]

On Monday 25 March 2013 07:14:22 Peter Grasch wrote:
> Hi Bob,
>
> On 03/25/2013 02:20 AM, Bob Stia wrote:
< snip sopme>
> >. there >> are accessability apps that could use a great deal of poliahing 
to make them much more usable like KTTS or JOVIE for sight impaired
> > people like myself. (please excuse any typos because I cannot srr
> > the fonts very well)
>
> I have already added a project idea for Simon, which is part of
> kde-accessibility. But you're right, there appear to be very few
> accessibility related projects this year. I suspect, it's mostly a
> matter of (the few) mentors having too little time.
>
> But if you have ideas that you would like to talk about, please do it
> here, on the mailing list.
> It's always good to hear from the target user group and you might even
> coax someone into mentoring!
>
> 
Hello Peter and thanks for your reply.

It is good that you have included Simon into the project. That is a 
speech-to-text app. Correct? That will be very useful to vision impaired 
users. 
But, as you suggested there are other apps that require (polishing), such as 
KTTS and Jovie. There are two areas for improvements. I run KTTS on openSUSE 
11.3 with KDE3 and Festival and openSUSE 12.2 with Jovie and espeak on KDE4.

The first area is the voice (kal)which is used. It is horrible with no 
inflection and sounds like R2D2.  It is, I believe an 8bit diphone but I know 
very little about how the voices are constructed. I do know however, how they 
sound to the listener. Apple has some very good voices. There are better 
voices out there for Linux such as, ambrola which is a Belgian app. They are 
much better than the "kal voice". Much better yet are the Cmu voices 
(Carnegie Mellon University). They are far superior but very large and take 
alot of space.That is a small price to pay for visually impaired users 
especially in these days of huge HDs.The problem is that neither KTTS nor 
Jovie will use them. there are some how-to's on the internet but seem to appy 
only to Debian and the like. There is nothing that integrates them into KTTS 
or Jovie.  As far as I can tell it is all command line stuff. Not good for a 
visualy impaired user. There should be a simple easy way to incorporate 
better voices into KTTS and Jovie
.
The second area is there should be universal use in all apps and desktop 
functions. Presently they are only useful in Konqueror and Kate or copying 
text to the clipboard, then opening the KTTS manager window and asking to 
speak the clipboard contents, which is very cumbersome. You should be able to 
use it for all apps, like Kmail and KPDF, etc..

I hope that my suggestions above will be adopted as a project in the GSoC and 
thank my wife for typing this long message for me.

Bob Stia