Hello;
I'll address the issue of Finnish speech as I have been dealing with
a similar issue with Swedish of late. Here is what I have found out.
If you are using the MacOS in Finnish and you have a Finnish voice
installed it will read the Finnish parts of the OS just fine. What is
rather odd is that there are some parts of VoiceOver which are only
in English at this point and those controls will be read in what I
can only describe as a very Finnish, or in my case Swedish, accent.
I haven't tried this with a Finnish voice and I don't know how it
would sound. I would be concerned that where as Swedish is a germanic
language and has many similarities with English such is not the case
with Finnish and how the Finnish voice would pronounce the English
interface might be very different.
It is possible to do a localization of the VoiceOver Utility into
Finnish. I could provide you the strings file to do this and then
build and installer that would insert the new localized items into
the VoiceOver Utility program. I've done this with Swedish and it
seems to work. You can set various parts of vocie over to speak in
various voices so for example the content could be in finnish while
other items would be read in an english voice. I could work on a
quick language/voice switcher for VoiceOver. That sounds like a good
idea.
My understanding is that Apple Logic line is going to be VoiceOver
compatible at some point.
Finnish voices for the Mac can be obtained from AssistiveWare http://
www.assistiveware.com/index.php
Greg Kearney
On Feb 14, 2007, at 09:29 , Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
Hi list,
I'm a twenty something legally blind hobby musician, programmer and
general power user from Finland. I've been using MS products
literally half of my life from DOS 4.x onwards to 6.22, WIn 95
through Xp but now am considering alternatives, for various more or
less uninteresting reasons. As I'm, despite my sight impairement, a
GUi guy at heart, OS X seems much more viable a choice than Linux
is. I'm not actually totally clueless about Macs either having beta-
tested Voice Over publically and know a die-hard Mac friend whose
tried to convert me for half a dozen years. To skip to my first
question search forwards for 1 period or better yet the regexp ^\d\.
I've been thinking of my core requirements of switching to a new OS
so here are some rather difficult questions about them in the
context of OS X. Namely: Finnish speech, virtualization, visual
customizability, music software and hardware compatibility. The big
problem here is that I would need to be absolutely certain that the
OS can deliver in these areas before buying a new machine and then
finding out the hard way that I'm going to be running Windows,
either virtually or for real, ninety percent of the time. Of
course, I'm glad that Boot cap does exist as a fallback option and
have enough Windows software that I'd probably need virtualization
for minor tasks.
Anyway, here we go with the questions:
1. I'm using Finnish speech on the Web and for e-mail on a daily
basis so I need a Finnish speech synthesizer for OS X. The
alternative is to surf or read mail in Windows which is kinda lame.
Are there any Finnish speech synths for OS X and how expensive are
they? Also, Voice Over would need to switch the language in which
on-screen text is being read. Is that already possible via a hotkey
or will it be in Leopard? I don't mind the apps and screen reader
prompts being in English as I've always computed in English.
I do know there's a multi-lingual Linux synth called eSpeak which
can probably be compiled to OS X as well. HOwever, I or someone
else would have to write a wrapper to be able to use that via what-
ever speech API the OS and Voice Over are using which is no easy
feat. Going even more hacker, one possibility would be to run my
current SAPi 4 based Windows speech synth in a virtual machine and
then drive it via Windows and Mac wrappers plus a named pipe to the
virtual machine. VmWare server, for instance, includes the ability
to read or write a guest machine parallel or serial port as a named
pipe.
But the trouble with both of these solutions is that they would
require extra work and wouldn't thus be available out of the box
and might not even be feasible. I'd like to rest assured if that if
I'm going to get a new Mac , it will speak my mother tongue as well.
2. I already do know I have important Windows software of which no
Mac port exists. My Finnish-English dictionary is actually a Win
3.1 app and the local equivalent of bookshare has a proprietry
Windows and Linux-only client program. A third area is sequencing,
I'm not sure if it is feasible on the Mac as well. SO two
questions. IS there already or is someone going to write an OS X
native version of the Win32 API emulator wine? Also, what's the
best Windows virtualization solution out there and does it support
low-latency audio and MIDI? Neither VmWare nor Virtual PC expose
the underlying sound card and other PCI hardware, so that means
lots of latency and no hardware specific features.
3. I use a combination of speech, braille and magnification to
access the GUI regardless of OS. I do know Leopard is going to have
Braille but howabout visual customizability? Too get the big
picture of the GUI and use it optimally magnified, it is extremely
important that there are no gradients or transparency and that GUI
elements have good contrast between their background colors.
Ideally I would take black title bars and buttons, white on dark
blue text fields and tables as well as a dark turqwoise background
for dialog boxes and menus. THe only GUI environment that offers
this level of customizability without trickery is the currently
inaccessible KDE. Windows isn't quite as good but nevertheless
let's me make text fields stand out against dialogs as well as very
clear, no gradiant title bars.
I've tweaked all of the visuals under OS X but it remains
subjectively almost as horrible as Windows Vista is going to be, if
you've got a quirky bit of sight like I do. In a way I do
understand Apple. THey've chosen a cool consistant look for the
average sighted user whose probably not interested in tweaking the
look and might even make it worse. But from an accessibility point
of view, OS X gives me very little choice.
I've read about some 3rd party tweakers that let you re-skin the
user interface. So if I made a custom skin with only the desired
solid colors in it it just might work. Are there already such
accessible OS X looks out there and is this strategy feasible?
What's the best app to change the look and how much does it cost?
The last thing that worries me about such apps is the support. It's
pretty bad if minor OS updates are going to break the skin support
every time or if in using OS X with a custom mod like that I'm
automagicaly classified as an unsupported user. I've never needed
the MS tech support in dealing with DOS or Windows, though, so
hopefully I won't need to call Apple either.
4. I'm doing music as a hobby and have loads of hardware synths and
an analog mixer. The only two things I need on the computer for
making music are a good MIDI sequencer and a Sound Editor (maybe
also a multi-track recorder). The first is what worries me, though.
As the bear minimum, I absolutely need support for multiple MIDI
ports with instrument definition files for each device,
quantization with an adjustable strength and basic data views such
as event list and piano roll. ON the Windows side I've been using
both old Cakewalk products and the MIDI sequencer QWS, which has
been written by a sight-impaired guy. SO which are my MIDI
sequencing choices on the Mac?
I read about Garage Band that its quantize is always at 100 percent
which is just plain unacceptable in the kind of music I'm doing.
I've also asked in the Logic Audio forum and someone there tested
it with Voice over saying that it is not really usable yet, as I
suspected having had some horrible Windows Experiences with Sound
Diver. I've tried Cubase and Ableton Live on the PC and if they're
as bad on the Mac, they aren't usable either.
On the bright side I read here that Apple is going to improve the
situation. But I doubt Logic wil be totally accessible. I don't
want to be a killjoy, but I suppose that means partially
accessible. If Macintosh soft synths are as bad as their Windows
counterparts, there are loads of instruments with bitmapped text
that shows up as just images, no keyboard interface or even worse
no concept of tab order and focus. Given such problems there's
nothing an accessible host program can do. Also, some concepts such
as graphically editable envelopes and the piano roll are
fundamentally visual. Though I'm suspecting that the points you
insert in an envelope could be represented and edited in a table
control.
So the only mainstream sequencer I haven't heard anything bad about
is Digital Performer. How accessible is it? Ar there any shareware
or freebie MIDI sequencers for the Mac which might be more
accessible? As I said, my needs are actually fairly basic.
I suppose I'd better ask these same questions on the audio list.
But I didn't wish to subscribe to two mailing lists just to ask a
couple of questions. It would be great if someone could forward the
music related bits on the audio list and add that people should
reply to me off-list. OR I can, of course, join the list too and
repost part of this message.
5. I'd like to be certain that I can reuse the sound card and MIDI
interfaces plus controllres from my Current PC, provided that I'm
going to switch. IS there an official hardware compatibility list?
I think both my EWS88 MT sound card and USB MIDI sport 1x1 and 4x4
are supported but might be wrong. I also have the HardSID card and
an USB based Evolution UC33 knob box. My synths are normal MIDI
devices so as long as the interface works, they'll work fine.
Any help greatly appreciated. I appologise for the length and the
rather pessimist tone of this mail. But it seems lots of fairly
important questions need to be answered positively or worked-around
in some way before I can honestly consider switching, as much as
I'd like to. Dual-booting is not really a work-around. I'm afraid
that if I'm going to boot to Windows I'm going to stay there.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
