Hi Eric,
I'm Csaba Godo from Hungary. We know each other from the JAWS mailing
list of David Ferrin. We have changed some mails during the past times.
Now let me to introduce myself to you a little bit better.
I'm a very low vision programmer who uses JAWS as primary screen reader
and who is involved in artifical speech synthesis. Since Freedom
licenced Nuance's Vocalizer synthetizer family disturbed me that Eszter,
the Hungarian voice, has so many mistakes and errors that makes really
difficult to use it with JAWS for longer time. When Vocalizer was
available for NVDA Our small team, consisting of blind college students
and programmers, has contacted Tiflotehnia, the distributor of NVDA
version of Vocalizer and Vocalizer Expressive, to work together to
correct these mistakes. We have managed to correct them with Vocalizer
Studio, so the updated version of both synthetizers for NVDA is already
available.
Now we would like to offer you the same cooperation that we offered for
Tiflotehnia to fix and update the JAWS versions of both synthetizers. We
offer our cooperation to Freedom for free. The only thing we request you
to have this cooperation directly, rather than go through your local
reseller.
For Freedom, with this cooperation would it be possible to update and
enchance both Eszter (Vocalizer) and Mariska (Vocalizer Expressive)
voices without any cost and time. We know that your local reseller has
indicated these errors many times to you as errors which makes difficult
to use these voices with JAWS. With our cooperation Freedom could
increase the level of satisfaction among the Hungarian JAWS users. I
know that Hungary is a very small market for you, but I think the
satisfaction of every JAWS users is important for Freedom. Or I'm wrong?
Now some words about the work we have done with Vocalizer Studio: We
have rebuilt the whole dictionary and corrected many pronunciation
errors and even extended the pronunciation and grammar rules. Currently
we are working on extending phoneme database, namely to extend the
phoneme-character bindings to make able these synthetisers to read
characters which does not exist in Hungarian alphabet, but are common in
our Hungarian cultural environment. I mean for example the special
characters of the spoken languages of the surrounding countries.
(Comment: I know that it is possible to edit the symbol (SBL) files of
each synthetizers in JAWS, but in this way it is not possible to force
JAWS to read correctly words contains characters, which have an entry in
an SBL file.
If I make an entry for a special letter, ie. for "ß" (which character
does not exists in Hungarian alphabet, but exists in Hungarian family
names of German origin), then JAWS detects it as stand alone letter. So
the name "Weiß" is read by JAWS as if it would be written as "Wei ß".
The program during the text processing enters an extra space before the
given character. It is very disturbing and sometimes makes impossible to
understand the text.)
As member of the management team of Freedom Scientific I would like to
ask you to help us to connect to your team responsible for synthetizers
to work together to make available the updated and corected versions of
both synthetizer voices for JAWS users.
Best regards,
Csaba Godó
Cellular: (+36 30) 921-9317
E-mail: [email protected]
Skype: godocsaba
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