Hello all.
This is my proposal for the Page reader GSoC idea.
I've done a little search to try getting something portable and
powerful, I found some interesting TTS engines like:
speech dispatcher (http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd): provides a
powerful device independant C Api to write TTS applications.
Gnome-speech library: This could be the best choice but the only problem
is that it may be not portable.
There's some other engines, and the choice need a study and some
feedbacks from the netsurf team
Well, maybe looking for portable engines isn't very efficient, the best
is to implement this system for each platform using one of the
platform itself engines but just keep the API.
The mentor of this project underlined some points:
* Overview mode, which announces the document headings
Reading headings that come from <hn> elements. This is a
good way to "introduce" the web page to the user
* Section skipping to allow swift to access to the next part of the
document
* Repetition of the current section or skipping back to previous
sections
I believe the best way to do this is keyboard shortcuts.
Like using a magic key that enables the reader control and then hit some key
to perform a task (ctrl + N: for next document, ctrl +
R: start reading... things like that)
* How to differentiate link text from the rest of the text
* How to handle emphasis tags; <em> and <strong>
I spoke to jmb and takkaria, and they gave me some
interesting links to think about the subject
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-sections.html#outlines
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/aural.html#sample
The user should also be able to customize the reader, like changing the
voice and so..., And he should be able
to tell the reader to read only some highlighted text part, that's very
useful.
