Speakup Soft Speech--What's the status?

[Janina Sajka]

Historically, Kirk, you are correct. However, the trend is to identify language in documents. And, it's certainly possible to read any particular user's .i18n data, should they have such a file. So, there are certainly mechanisms for web documents and particular user logins. I have been working inside the W3C to argue that we need also to have clearly defined mechanisms for changing language on the fly within a document so that, for example, your French book can be en English mostly, but switch to French and back again, as it seeks to teach you French. May I note that the NISO/DAISY, next-generation ANSI Z39-86 supports this?

Kirk Reiser writes:
> Janina Sajka <janina at rednote.net> writes:
> 
> > Chuck, you're reading me loud and clear! <grin> That's exactly what
> > I mean. I see that Speech-Dispatcher claims to support switching
> > among soft synths on the fly, even based on circumstance. For
> > example, it supports responding to different languages by using a
> > different soft synth. So, I expect that we should have a concept of
> > how we facilitate switching from Flite, to DEC Talk software speech,
> > and then to Cepstral, and then back again to Flite. And, it needs to
> > be as easy as using Speaks With--which I thank you for, by the way.
> 
> That is an unintentional mistake in the speech dispatcher
> documentation.  It would be very difficult to be able to reliably
> determine in context what language a particular word or phrase was
> part of.
> 
> The speech dispatcher software does support switching of synths on the
> fly but it is a very recent addition brought on by my questioning this
> exact topic of documentation.
> 
> I do not have support for switching on the fly yet in speakup or
> speechd-up but will hopefully in the near future now that it can be
> done in speech dispatcher.
> 
>   Kirk
> 
> -- 
> 
> Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
> e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
> phone: (519) 661-3061
> 
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

		Chair, Accessibility Workgroup
	Free Standards Group (FSG)

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