dectalk issues

[Adam Myrow]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, William Hubbs wrote:

> I guess what I'm wondering is, since pitch shifting isn't supported by the
> dectalks, I'm not sure that messing with the pitch for caps indication
> as the default is a good idea.  What do you think?

I don't know, but every other screen reader in existence has made this 
work for well over a decade.  Most screen readers do the pitch shift by 
default, and will offer another choice of saying "cap."  In other words, 
they don't have hard-coded strings.  I think that this is the way Speakup 
should go.  There would be a parameter to either say something, or shift 
pitch.  If the user set the parameter to say something, the string could 
be a message that could be in with the other i18n messages.  For pitch 
shift, just do the math.  For example, the current pitch is 100, so add 
50, then send the command to the synthesizer to set the pitch to the 
result.  When switching back to lowercase, just send the command to 
restore the pitch to what it was before.  Another thing to consider is 
that some screen readers, like JFW, let the user determine for themselves 
how much of a pitch shift there should be for uppercase letters.