[BRLTTY] Accessibility talk at the GNU Hackers Meeting

[MENGUAL Jean-Philippe]

Ei,

Le 30/08/2013 23:37, Reece Dunn a écrit :
> On 30 August 2013 20:40, Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> We had the opportunity to give a talk about accessibility at the GNU
>> Hackers Meeting this summer, the video is available
>>
>> http://www.irill.org/videos/GNU_Hackers_Meeting_2013/Samuel_Thibault_Jean-Philippe_Mengual-Freedom_0_for_everybody_really.webm
> Thank you for an interesting presentation.
>
> I have an interest in speech synthesizers and am maintaining a branch
> of espeak that makes it easier to build and work on in Linux (via
> autotools) [https://github.com/rhdunn/espeak].
>
> Are there any features/functionality missing from espeak, along with
> their priority?
>
> If the issue is of pronunciation accuracy, I have a pronunciation
> dictionary command-line tool as part of my Cainteoir Text-to-Speech
> engine project [https://github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine] that can
> be used to create and manage pronunciation dictionaries for languages
> that can then be used to generate a <lang>_extra file with words that
> eSpeak mispronounces. NOTE: I only currently support the default
> British English voice phonemes, but can easily support others

Cool thanks for information. In my opinion the main problem with Espeak 
is that the voice is not natural at all. Listening to it, we could 
really think that the computer is speaking but not any human voice. It's 
difficult to put up for "basic" users, despite numerous benefits of Espeak.
Moreurer, having tested NVDA on Windows a few time ago, I've seen that 
Espeak is provided with a lot of variants. I wonder why they're not 
available on Linux. These variants are for French language, but I guess 
there're translated or they have equivalent. And why not present on 
standard Linux systems, where I feel that no update has come for Espeak 
to change its quality for years?
Finally, I think Espeak could improve its "prosody", i.e. its voice 
while reading sentences, marking punctuation marks. So far we don't see 
any difference between a question mark, a dot, an exclamation mark. And 
all that with an English accent, even for other languages.


> .
>
> NOTE: I also have a page on assessing the (subjective) quality of a
> speech synthesizer at http://reecedunn.co.uk/cainteoir/design/quality

Thanks. Very interesting.  I think it'd  worth to study speech 
synthetisers issue in the free software.

Regards,


> .
> Thanks,
> - Reece H Dunn (Cainteoir Technologies)
>
>