speakup and programming code

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Recent posts by Thomas Ward and others have prompted this
suggestion for a speakup feature that might greatly facilitate
things for people who deal with program code such as C or C++,
and might make exception dictionaries less critical to implement.

Many times the mixture of capitalization within an alphabetic
string is unusual in program code, and of course it is important.
I first ran across this many years ago with the name of the
popular data base package "d base ii". Now what you should have
heard inside the quotes is what everyone says when they pronounce
it, but "d base" is actually written "dBASE", and I defy you to
hear that correctly without spelling it out character by
character.

Here is my suggestion: When speakup is sending a series of
letters to the synth and notices that (1) the current char is
upper case, and (2) the last char sent was lower case, then (3)
before sending the current char it should send whatever is needed
to break the current string into two parts. Maybe that would be a
CR, or a space, or some unspoken control char, or whatever. The
result would be "d base" instead of "dBASE", and C programmers
will recognize immediately that there will be zillions of similar
funny case mixtures that will be spoken more correctly if the
transition from lower to upper case within a string is broken up
with a neutral unspoken element that serves only to cause the
synth to pronounce what it has already received and treat the
following as a new word.

This would perhaps be an inexpensive speakup modification that
would dramatically improve its performance for some of us.

Chuck


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