I've been asked whether Orca can use the eSpeak software synthesizer. I believe that Gnome Speech can be set up to use Speech Dispatcher, and Speech Dispatcher can use eSpeak. So in theory the answer seems to be "yes". Has anyone done this, and does it work in practice? Does responsiveness suffer as a result of the additional intermediary?
Or would it be better to write a Gnome Speech driver for eSpeak? The drivers seem fairly small but I don't understand the environment in which they are written (concepts such as bonobo, oaf, corba etc). But if someone wants to write a driver then I'll be happy to assist. eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ Some users on the SpeakUp mailing list say they prefer it over Festival for the purpose of screen reading. It speaks British English and several other languages, although some of these are just initial draft implementations that will need advice and assistance from native speakers to improve. eSpeak version 1.11 is in the Edgy Universe repository. I'm hoping someone will submit the latest version, 1.14, for Edgy if it's not too late. Unfortunately Edgy Knot 3 is unusable on my computer, so I can't try these things myself. I can't get internet access - "network is unavailable" (I use a router gateway on ethernet), and everything is painfully slow (eg. dragging windows or scrolling in gedit). Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 does not have these problems. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
