[gnuspeech-contact] Re: Thoughts on GNUSpeech and possible accessibility applications

[Dalmazio Brisinda]

> Marcelo Yassunori Matuda <address@hidden> wrote:
> > GnuSpeech runs on Linux, but you  need to install GNUstep. The source
> > is available at:
> > svn://svn.sv.gnu.org/gnuspeech/gnustep/trunk
>
> Thanks. I'll check that out.
>
> Has the text to speech daemon been ported yet? The difficulty is  
> that I
> wouldn't be able to operate the interactive (graphical) environment  
> using
> either braille or speech, so what I really need is access from the  
> shell.

Jason,

The text to speech daemon has been partially ported to OS X. By  
"partially" I mean given text it generates synthesized output, but  
there is currently no intonation (something I intend to remedy  
shortly) or other more sophisticated features. It's also accessible  
via OS X services.

I'm not sure about the port to Linux though, as the text to speech  
daemon uses the OS X distributed objects architecture, and I don't  
know to what degree this same architecture is supported on the Gnustep/ 
Linux platform. Needless to say this elegant IPC/RPC architecture  
makes writing servers/dameons quite straightforward on OS X.

There was also an accessibility application called Touch N' Talk  
written for the Nextstep platform some years ago, that used a graphics  
tablet, and textured overlay that allowed visually impaired users to  
browse through text documents, with a visual representation of the  
tablet and activities occurring on the tablet. However, it seems that  
the last version of the software currently in the nextstep  
distribution tree was not the latest working version on the Nextstep  
platform. So this would probably need to be tracked down before a  
proper port could begin on either the gnustep or osx platforms.

(I have an old crashed internal hard drive which I think holds this  
information - latest Nextstep Touch 'N Talk -- but I've never had the  
opportunity to try data recovery of this information... and I'm not  
sure if it exists archived somewhere else -- I would imagine so.  
Possibly on one of the old Nextstep machines or old backup systems if  
they are still around. David, the project administrator, might know  
more about this).

Best,
dalmazio