Text To Speech in Read Etexts improved again

[James Simmons]

This weekend I made another release of Read Etexts.  This one fixes the 
pause/resume problem.  I also introduced a new toolbar for Speech, which 
is adapted from the toolbar of the Speak activity but is modified to use 
speech-dispatcher.  You can select the language to use and control pitch 
and rate.  What you can't do is change anything while speech is going 
on.  You need to pause, make your change, then resume.

I don't plan on doing much more with this until I can get 
speech-dispatcher installed and working on my XO.  After that I expect a 
whole bunch of usability issues to come up and I'll deal with them at 
that time.  One thing I expect to have to deal with is preventing power 
saving from being activated while speech is in progress.  I'd also like 
speech to pause a bit between paragraphs.  Right now it reads the 
contents of the current page and stops.  I'm considering making going to 
the next page automatic.  Then I'm also trying to think of a good way to 
get it to start reading somewhere other than the top of a page.  That 
would be good to skip over Gutenberg notices and tables of contents.

I've been using the locale files from core Read up to now, so I haven't 
needed any translations to be done.  Now that's starting to change, 
because I've added the Speech toolbar.  I'm not sure how to proceed.

If anyone wants to try this out they can download it here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts

James Simmons