espeakup v0.1 released

[Hynek Hanke]

Dear William and others,

thank you very much for your contribution, it is
very important that people work on accessibility,
on connecting different tools and software synthesis
is definitely very important for the future. I'm also
happy to see that this concept of interfacing software speech
from Speakup that we piloted with Kirk in early 2000
seems to work well.

I see that espeakup has some new nice features
over speechd-up. It is however also lacking a lot
of functionality of speechd-up including some very
substantial and developement-costly things:
internationalization, audio output handling,
configuration and others. It might also initialy
seem to be easier to install and run, simplifying
the whole thing, but this is a false impression.
By bypassing the other accessibility components,
it creates a whole new set of problems and bariers
for cooperation with other accessibility tools. This
is not meant to be criticism as espeakup is in a
very early developement stage.

For the above reasons, Brailcom would like to join
forces with the developers of espeakup to merge
the new functionality of these two projects so that
we can work together on a full, well-designed and
future-sustainable solution. I propose we target at the
issues of easiness to install and setup, on filling in
the missing capabilities and better integration into
the system and into the distributions.

Have a nice day,
Hynek Hanke