Hi all,
To broaden the discussion I've also added in the -devel list.
Luke Yelavich wrote:
Hi all
For those who weren't at the meeting, we discussed various aspects of
implementation for the live CD, and the GUI install. A couple of issues
were raised conserning the implementation of speech for gnopernicus.
From further discussion with Daniel Holbach, it seems that there is more
to do than first thought. The following is a summary of what has been
discussed so far, including the first implementations, up to my
conversation this evening.
* An option on the gfxboot screen was created for people to select
various accessibility profiles to be loaded when the live CD boots.
* One of these involves loading a screen reader with synthesized speech
for access to GNOME and the installer.
* The necessary settings for these profiles to be activated are not yet
implemented, but it was decided to put flite on the CD rather than
festival, due to disk space constraints, as flite is much smaller.
* It was determined that gnome-speech does not have a driver for flite,
so an alternate way of interfacing flite with gnopernicus was suggested,
this being to use a newly developed driver for gnome-speech to interface
with speech-dispatcher. Speech-dispatcher can interface with flite. This
would require either waiting for a new gnome-speech release, or patching
the current package with CVS code containing the speech-dispatcher
driver.
* Speech-dispatcher 0.6 has not yet entered Debian sid, and 0.6 is the
only version that the gnome-speech driver will work with. In order for
us to use it, we need to upgrade the package in universe to 0.6, and get
it promoted to main.
* In order to prevent festival from being pulled in when gnome-speech is
included, we need to split one or both gnome-speech drivers from the
core gnome-speech packages to prevent this from happening.
Speech-dispatcher itself doesn't have many dependancies, the biggest one
being flite.
* Daniel mentioned that feature freeze is fast approaching, and all this
needs to be packaged up, and tested on all three architectures.
So as you can see, this might be more difficult than we first thought.
Daniel, if I have missed anything, please bring it up or correct me.
Henrik, I am very interested in your opinion about all of this. If
anybody else has anything to say, please speak up, as we need to get
something sorted for the release ASAP.
I'd like to bring the core developers into the discussion at this point
to since we are approaching a crunch point.
As I see it, we have 3 options:
1. Pursue the path you describe above of packaging and promoting speech
dispatcher along with the gnome drivers. This would land us on
approximately the solution we had planned, though it will be tight to
get it working in time. Perhaps we can pursue this if we also agree on a
reasonable fall-back plan.
2. Upgrade from Festival-lite to the full Festival - This would give us
better speech quality and add 6-7 languages, but would require 40MB
instead of the 8MB used by f-lite. While this is theoretically possible
by removing language packs and/or Windows-FOSS, I doubt it will be given
serious consideration because it will have a significant impact for a
large number of users (and space is just always tight). Since the space
calculations get more detailed as we approach the release date and other
things settle in, I also don't think this would be a possible fall-back
option. I would of course love to be wrong :)
3. Remove support for screen readers on the Dapper Live CD. This would
also mean removing the 'blindness' option from the menu. This is an
unfortunate thing to do since the visually impaired community is by far
the most active AT user group on Linux and are as such our main target
group at this stage (there are other, larger groups, such as the elderly
with mild motoric difficulties, but these may not be early adopters in
the same way.) It would also not allow us to claim to have the best
default AT support among distros (perhaps we still would in some ways,
but it wouldn't be such a clear case to make).
Orthogonally to these option, we also have the opportunity of creating
an AT derivative. This could easily have the full Festival package and
perhaps a few additional AT packages like dasher. This could be released
shortly after dapper and be made available for download (space can be
made by removing the Win-FOSS). There are benefits to this approach, but
getting the AT infrastructure support onto the main CDs is still the big
prize.
Personally, I would like to see us push for option #1 (assuming #2 to be
unrealistic) and have #3 as a fall-back. I'm not the best suited to
judge what is required to make #1 a reality though. I'd like to hear
from Matt and Colin if possible what you thing WRT timeframes and the
suitability of the less-than-completely-mature speech dispatcher et al.
- Henrik
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