This needs to be discussed privately with Eric. I applaud the idea but this is not the place.
David Ferrin Always be yourself because the people that matter don't mind, and the ones that mind don't matter. -----Original Message----- From: JAWS-Users-List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Csaba Godo Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 9:28 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [JAWS-Users] ► Offer to fix bugs in Hungarian voices of Vocalizer 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 For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/ For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
