Accessible JAVA Development Tools

[Janina Sajka]

Herewith an announcement of some interest from Sun. Guess it's time to 
give their rpms a second try, this time in the 1.4 version of Java.

FreeTTS 1.1, a speech synthesizer written entirely in the Java(tm)
programming language, is now available.  FreeTTS 1.1 is available
from http://freetts.sourceforge.net/ and includes a number of
functional changes since 1.0:

o Testing with both the Release Candidate and Beta 3 versions of the
  Java(tm) 2 Platform, Standard Edition version 1.4 software (J2SE
  1.4).

o Incorporation of most of Flite 1.1 (thanks again, Alan Black and
  Kevin Lenzo, for your hard work!).  The only features we did not
  include were the fixed point operations and some work to reduce the
  footprint for very small platforms.

o A workaround for the audio crash on Linux.  There are still some
  issues, however, and we've been in close contact with the Java Sound
  developers.  We hope to see a fix for these issues somewhere in the
  J2SE 1.4.1 time frame.

o Better support for building and running on Windows platforms.  Note
  that this requires the Cygwin tools available from
  http://www.cygwin.com/.

NOTE: To be more in line with the JDK, we now use the JAVA_HOME
environment variable instead of JDK_HOME.  Please take note of this
change because it may come and bite you if you ignore it.

Alan and Kevin did a lot of work on the Flite 1.1 front end: it is now
much more clever in converting tokens to words.

The upgrade to 1.1 is also geared towards making FreeTTS more amenable
to voices created using the great work at FestVox (see http://festvox.org/).
I really want to encourage people to look at FestVox and help us work
on FestVox tools to generate voice data for FreeTTS.

For the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Speech Team,

Willie Walker, Manager and Principal Investigator
Paul Lamere, Staff Engineer
Philip Kwok, Member of Technical Staff

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org