UTF-8 and Speakup

[Janina Sajka]

Hi,

I'm glad you brought this up. I've been wrestling with a Speakup related
UTF8 issue for some time. Fortunately, there has been progress.

1.)	The old situation where screen review would suddenly only see
null chars appears resolved. I have been defaulting to LANG=en_US.UTF-8
on my Fedora 9 laptop without problems.


2.)	However, I can still trigger that problem with null chars by
suspending and then resuming. Since that pretty much destroys the
usability of Speakup for me, I spent my entire week at the recent Linux
Foundation Collaboration Summit working exclusively with Orca which
suspended and resumed without incident.

To the other question of mixed language pronunciation--I've not noted
English Speakup being able to correctly pronounce foreign language
chars.  Would be nice, and may be possible, I suppose.

In rich text environments (like web or OpenOffice), however, we should
expect our synthesizer synthesizers to switch pronunciation on the fly,
if content is correctly coded with <lang=> tags. This may require
loading more than one language, but that could be indicated by
configurations. I believe there has been movement in this direction, but
I expect it's mostly evident where rich text is properly parsed, which
would mainly mean Orca.

Janina

Zachary Kline writes:
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> 
> Hi,
> I've been curious for a while now about Unicode, UTF-8, and related
> issues.  I imagine that whether or not Speakup works with Unicode
> characters would depend in large part on the speech synthesizer used.
> Add to that, of course, the fact that seeing a character on screen and
> pronouncing it are two different things.  So, all told, I'm just curious
> about this topic in general: what works and what doesn't?  I'm not going
> to be doing anything foreign language related myself, but do like the
> idea of being able to put in an accented letter now and again.
> Best,
> Zack.