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GNOME Talks! Part 3

Submitted by stro on Sat, 2003-05-24 01:53. Gnome Accessibility

In the third (MP3 Audio) of a four-part series about Gnopernicus from the American Council of the Blind, Sun accessibility engineer Marc Mulcachy demonstrates Nautlius and gedit. He also makes a note about the complaints of doing these demostrations using a speech synthesizer that is no longer available, so for this demonstration and the next he will be using of the DecTalk speech synthesizer. He also demonstrates the FreeTTS speech synthesizer.

Also this week Glynn Foster presented some screenshots showing new configuration capplets for the GNOME accessibility features. The first shows a capplet for choosing which accessability features to enable, and the second shows a capplet for controlling the visual bell feature. Also Calum Benson highlighted some of the work being done on a new applet to show the status of various accessibility features.

Re: GNOME Talks! Part 3

Submitted by Johannes on Tue, 2003-05-27 10:48.

But it depends on Sun's Java JRE - which is proprietary software. The only usable free TTS engine without such strings attached is festival. Unfortunately it is not very well supported by Gnopernicus (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107638 )

I have tried out both festival and FreeTTS. But both deliver very poor results with the gnopernicus screen reader (only the first atom of each presentation chunk is spoken).

The only TTS engine which really worked for me was ViaVoice which is essentially unsupported.

This is a real problem: A free desktop should not depends on non-free software! So I hope that festival support is going to be improved in the future.

At the same time I fell that Marc Mulchahy's presentation was somewhat premature. Much of the software he used in his demonstrations is still at alpha or early beta stage.

If I was blind, I would find working with Gnome pretty much frustrating: Gnopernicus crashes every five minutes. Many applets and apps are not yet accessible. You either have to spend 50 USD for DecTalk or (illegally?) download from one place where it is still available in order to get satisfactory speech output.

The java-access-bridge designed to extend Gnome accessibility features to Java Swing apps exists only in CVS and at least I didn't get it to work at all. Also accessibility in Mozilla is still fairly incomplete (Gnopernicus wasn't able to present the prefs dialogue correctly).

But the biggest single drawback is: As soon as you want to read or write text in languages other than English, you are lost. Gnopernicus supports only English at the moment and festival supports English, Spanish and Welsh. Dunno about FreeTTS, though.

So there is still <b>a lot</b> of work before Gnome will be suitable for productive use by the average (non-technical) blind computer user.

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