<div class="gmail_quote"><div>Hi,<br><br>Thank you for your feedback and inputs.<br><br>One question that I have started wondering about now, is how "heavy" orca would be for the xo? The present speech server that we have written is in my assumption quite nice, and light weight with features specifically meant for the xo.
<br><br>Besides gnome-speech (afaik) does not use dbus. Hence I am wondering, if orca was ever ported to the xo, how many new dependencies it could create.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Have you looked at Speech Dispatcher (<a href="http://www.freebsoft.org/projects/speechd" target="_blank">http://www.freebsoft.org/projects/speechd</a>)? It is supported by Orca<br>and seems similar to the speech server you described. It doesn't currently interface with dbus, although it could presumably be made to do so. If you ever have self-voicing activities running on a system which is also running Orca, then they should use the same speech server so that they are not both trying to talk at the same time.
</blockquote><div><br>Absolutely, this is the issue that we want to resolve. When we started working on the speech server we were not really aware of orca :|. While self-voicing activities can use our speech-server without any problems, we might have trouble if someone (even us) ever thinks of porting orca to the xo. Can someone please share their thoughts about this issue.
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Indices should also be supported (espeak and Speech Dispatcher support them), since, if a user interrupts speech while reading a document, it is good to have the cursor left near the text that was being read before the
<br>speech was interrupted.</blockquote><div><br>Okay, thanks for the idea. I'll keep this in mind.<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Are you intending for this to complement a screen reader such as Orca, or are you intending for all activities to be self-voicing? Or are you still in the process of trying to decide that? What the application should do
<br>would depend on the api's intended purpose. There are also situations where "auditory icons" will get information across more quickly than spoken text (emacspeak, for instance, uses a set of such icons to supplement the speech).
</blockquote><div><br>Initially we wanted activities to be self voicing, and just provide a highlight and speak option for sugar. Call it lack of vision or information. However if we think a little ahead of us now, then someday one may want a complete accessibility toolkit on the xo. Which may lead to conflicts with the present speech server.
<br><br>We are kind of stuck at this point about the issue i have just described. Any ideas would be welcome!<br><br>Best,<br>Hemant<br></div></div>