hello, with a lot of accessibility related talk going out on this list, I just discovered that some thing is yet to be done. there is a big hole in the accessibility of gnu/linux desktop. while the gnome desktop is getting more and more accessible slowly, there is nothing but an un organised start made on the k desktop side. there is a speach front end for the k desktop it is called ktts. the link was given to me by roni it is http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php if any one want to have a look. so we will not be re inventing the wheal but use the wheal to build up a car. + we have the engine of the car also. I am refering to festival speach synthesizer. the mattter of fact is that it will be easiest to convert blind computer users to k desktop and thus linux, if we can provide a good screen reader. there are applications on the k desktop which make transition from windows to gnu/linux much easy as compared to gnome. and then the programmers or any one interested can be gathered together for this kind of an organisation. and the finansial aspect is that we can earn by providing this service to blind people. they can and will happily give out a few thousand rs for this service as compared to rs. 80000 + for some screen reader on windows. thanks all waiting for feedback. Krishnakant.
On 9/10/06, krishnakant Mane researchbase@gmail.com wrote:
hello, with a lot of accessibility related talk going out on this list, I just discovered that some thing is yet to be done. there is a big hole in the accessibility of gnu/linux desktop. while the gnome desktop is getting more and more accessible slowly, there is nothing but an un organised start made on the k desktop side. there is a speach front end for the k desktop it is called ktts. the link was given to me by roni it is http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php if any one want to have a look. so we will not be re inventing the wheal but use the wheal to build up a car.
- we have the engine of the car also. I am refering to festival
speach synthesizer. the mattter of fact is that it will be easiest to convert blind computer users to k desktop and thus linux, if we can provide a good screen reader. there are applications on the k desktop which make transition from windows to gnu/linux much easy as compared to gnome. and then the programmers or any one interested can be gathered together for this kind of an organisation. and the finansial aspect is that we can earn by providing this service to blind people. they can and will happily give out a few thousand rs for this service as compared to rs. 80000 + for some screen reader on windows. thanks all waiting for feedback. Krishnakant.
Hi Krishnakant,
This is an excellent idea. Please join and make this post to the KDE-india mailing list. In addition to this list you will find quite a few KDE developers who might be interested in developing this. There are more a couple people who develop for KDE as their day job.
Last but not the least, you might want to come to foss.in for the KDE BoF so that people can talk face-to-face with KDE developers. If there are enough interested people then maybe we can have an accessibilty BoF at foss.in 2006.
I am ccing both KDE-india and foss.in in this reply.
-- Vinayak
ps: For context I am attaching Krishnakant's mail to the ilug-bom mailing list some days back.
<quote>
hello all, I had introduced myself in my previous email regarding gnopernicus. for those who did not read it. I am a new member from Mumbai. my name is Krishnakant Mane and I am totally blind. I have done research from IIT mumbai and now own a software firm. basically I am posting this email to inform all that I am developing a talking book reader. it is a device which can be carried in the pocket and can be attached to any scanner. once the printed matter is scanned the ocr software will convert it into text document or word document. then the device can be detached and the blind person can read those scanned documents any time any where. we are using all free software including ocr softwares etc. the device will be running gnu with linux kernel booting from a USB pen drive. however I have certain issues regarding the system. I also want to make this a community project so more and more people can benifit. I am not putting all the details in this email, but those who will be interested in contrubuting to this project can email me personally on researchbase@gmail.com or krmane@gmail.com as an alternative. right now the major problem is to create a small linux kernel that can have only sufficient modules to boot from a pen drive and support sound. please send me private emails if any one would be interested to assist. thanking all Krishnakant.
</quote>
hi Vinayak, nice to see such a quick response. well, I think it should not be a big trouble to find programmers for this project. firstly, there are a lot of univercity level and pg level students doing a lot of project on the same track of linus developing the first linux kernel. many such developers can be gathered. secondly, we all can unite and find sources for funding which are very much available with IIT Incubator or tcs for that matter. since we are paying people any ways, they will work for this project. by the way tell me some thing more about kde-india? how does it work? how many members approx are there? can you give me the email id to subscribe? and I don't intend to ignite a desktop fire flame, but can any one provide data on weather KDE is used more on common linux desktops or gnome? any comparison? again this is just to know the stats? Krishnakant.
most important factor, now since we know that openoffice and things like that can work on regional languages (can some one give me more info on that). it will be more effective when we talk about accessibility. I am posting a new thread and expect particularly roni, jtd, Dinesh shah and all other interested to respond. it will be about a campain to promote linux in the rural areas with regional language support. look forward for that email. mean while, I will like to know as to how much development has taken place in festival voice synthesizer in regional languages.
if a substantially good work has been done, then we may as well take this a point while making k desktop accessible. thanking all. Krishnakant. PS: there are some members who send me personal messages on this list. of no one cared to respond on this I am doing it. please semd me private messages off the list. Krishnakant.
On Monday 11 September 2006 03:21 pm, krishnakant Mane wrote:
most important factor, now since we know that openoffice and things like that can work on regional languages (can some one give me more info on that). it will be more effective when we talk about accessibility.
http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20051113
Then there is Sphinx for speech recognition. http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/sphinx4/
I am posting a new thread and expect particularly roni, jtd, Dinesh shah and all other interested to respond. it will be about a campain to promote linux in the rural areas with regional language support.
there are already projects going on at sarovar.org and IIT Chennai. Afaik Tamil, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Gujarati, Oriya, Assamese are already fully supported. Also a project known as Indic computing which has a distro too. http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/
look forward for that email. mean while, I will like to know as to how much development has taken place in festival voice synthesizer in regional languages.
Spanish. Festival and friends support building of the neccessary diphone sets and ronunciation rules to incorporate new languages. However this is a non trivial task.
if a substantially good work has been done, then we may as well take this a point while making k desktop accessible.
All the tools are there to do the job. Just that someone has to sit and do it.
On 11/09/06, jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in wrote: All the tools are there to do the job. Just that someone has to sit and do it. yes exactly. and my point is to actually go to the villages and do the field work. and now since lot of technical work is done, it is more easy. talking about the accessibility issue, well that is some thing jtd rightly pointed out. a lot of tools are there but screen reader is missing. because festival is a text to speach synthesizer not a screen reader. a screen reader is one that will use festival as its mouth piece. this I am writing for those of you who are confused with the concept. Please contribute on this topic. Krishnakant.
now since we know that openoffice and things like that can work on regional languages (can some one give me more info on that).
yes, i think we have some GUI translations for hindi, tamil, bangla and punjabi..
look forward for that email. mean while, I will like to know as to how much development has taken place in festival voice synthesizer in regional languages.
i knew of a guy (who studied with me in college) and created an ms windows based tool. it used MS speech SDK to read devanagri text. last i knew, he had setup a company, and was selling this commercially. (his company is also into other services, btw)
I am not aware of any equivalent in FLOSS world.. however, we do have speech synthesis tools and libraries like festival, (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/)
So, the quickest way to get this working would be to define lexicons for some desi languages to one of such existing TTS tools. Since Indian languages have an umambiguous pronunciation of a written expression, this could actually be simpler than it is for a language like english or french.
If you are keen to work on this, I would suggest you speak to the relevant people at University of Edinburgh, get some funda on adding new language to festival.
who knows, (if they have the budget etc) you MAY even get some funding for this work.
On 9/11/06, krishnakant Mane researchbase@gmail.com wrote:
mean while, I will like to know as to how much development has taken place in festival voice synthesizer in regional languages.
Take a look at this. I havn't tried it but might prove usefull http://dhvani.sourceforge.net/
Should be a good starting point i guess
dear friends. after going through all the resources available as speach options for synthesis on linux and possible screen readers, I have come to the following conclusions. 1. with due respect to all the efords for developing a very natural sounding synthesizer (I know it is very hard), no attempts have been so far organised in a way to make it really of high standards. just hear eloquence or dectalk and you will come to know what I am trying to say. these two are the most widely used synthesizers but are non open source. further they are very costly too. we can approach the carnegi melon univercity or edinbaro for assistance. what is primarily needed is to develop a very high quality exceptable tts engine like text assist or decktalk. we also need to make a speach synthesizer which besides indian languages can talk indian english. it should be noted that today's english synths are only british, australian and american english talking. this is not always easy for a blind person to understand. I have been to the states and UK so I know how easy it is to understand but think about those who don't have this opportunity? (and most of them don't have). 2. we need to develop a really really good screen reader. I will fix up a project meet for this and I will demonstrate the leading screen reader on windows platform, JAWS for windows. compare it with orca and/ or gnopernicus and the difference will be obvious. it is not the amount of functionality which is causing a problem, functionality and features can be added over a period of time. the problem is the way in which accessibility needs to be implemented in screen readers. over the 4 years of speach interfaceing and accessibility, one thing I have noticed is that screen readers still read text and not what it simbolises. fortunately gnome desktop has got accessibility built in with the core api so it becomes that much easy to wrok ork it out. k destop has got accessibility too but has not been exploited right now. 3. general awareness amongst the blind people about linux is another major issue. while this also applies equally to sited people, I have found masses of blind people who still feel that windows and ms office are the only two things that ever exist on a computer. for them linux is as good as discovery of life on other planets. we need to make them linux aware and how it particularly benifits them. 4. point number 1 and 2 must be taken up by the same programming unit or at least different departments of a same team. the two points go hand in hand. as an aside to the awareness issue. I am planning a school level campain for teachers and students. the reason why no such attempt is becoming successfull is that we end up takeing all this unfortunate microsoft users into a strange land. let's not shy away from comparison and rather prove it that gnu/linux not only offers every thing that windows gives, but it gives more than that with some learning. I believe jtd, roni, and others will agree that with the advent of ubuntu and the latest debian releases gnu/linux has become absolutely user friendly and flawless enough that even a house wife can use it. there should be no reason why we should not positively compare our selfs against windows and show the windows users what they are missing? Krishnakant.
On Tuesday 12 September 2006 04:26 pm, krishnakant Mane wrote:
- we need to develop a really really good screen reader. I will
fix up a project meet for this and I will demonstrate the leading screen reader on windows platform, JAWS for windows. compare it with orca and/ or gnopernicus and the difference will be obvious.
That would indeed be most useful for the rest of us to understand the issues at hand. Can it be at the coming lug meet.
BTW when and where is the lug meet being held?
On 12/09/06, jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in wrote: That would indeed be most useful for the rest of us to understand the issues at hand. Can it be at the coming lug meet.
BTW when and where is the lug meet being held? I will get the demo along. have to check with availability of a windows machine however. and the meeting is on 16th. the point to be mainly understood is that there is a good case study for a successfull screen reader and I have all my expertise on speach interface and accessibility. so we can not only see a successfull screen reader on windows but also I can prepare the entire project plan with the assistance of the given pool of programming tallent available amongst us. even jaws for windows has some flaws. and it is due to wrong implementation of microsoft active accessibility. so we can look for even better features. thanking all. see you on 16th in HBCSE. Krishnakant "as blind as a bat"
On Tuesday 12 September 2006 16:23, krishnakant Mane wrote:
On 12/09/06, jtd <j.....@[NOSPAM]....net.in> wrote:
Hi, sorry to interrupt this thread but Krishnakant please dont quote jtd's or anybody's entire email address. Please reconfigure your mail client to prevent this.
Thanks.
Sometime on Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 07:59:11PM +0530, jtd said:
That would indeed be most useful for the rest of us to understand the issues at hand. Can it be at the coming lug meet.
BTW when and where is the lug meet being held?
We have no agenda for the meet as yet. Should we all meet on 16th itself at HBCSE?
Anurag
Anurag wrote:
Sometime on Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 07:59:11PM +0530, jtd said:
BTW when and where is the lug meet being held?
We have no agenda for the meet as yet. Should we all meet on 16th itself at HBCSE?
We do have an agenda and an important one. It is to discuss the electronic signposts for guiding visually disabled people on public roads.
Regards,
Rony.
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Sometime on Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 03:45:28PM +0530, Rony said:
Anurag wrote:
Sometime on Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 07:59:11PM +0530, jtd said:
BTW when and where is the lug meet being held?
We have no agenda for the meet as yet. Should we all meet on 16th itself at HBCSE?
We do have an agenda and an important one. It is to discuss the electronic signposts for guiding visually disabled people on public roads.
Allright. With agenda i meant we dont have a speaker and talk this time, something that requires projectors and whiteboards. So why not meet at an open place like some garden?
Anurag
krishnakant Mane wrote:
I am planning a school level campain for teachers and students. the reason why no such attempt is becoming successfull is that we end up takeing all this unfortunate microsoft users into a strange land. let's not shy away from comparison and rather prove it that gnu/linux not only offers every thing that windows gives, but it gives more than that with some learning. I believe jtd, roni, and others will agree that with the advent of ubuntu and the latest debian releases gnu/linux has become absolutely user friendly and flawless enough that even a house wife can use it. there should be no reason why we should not positively compare our selfs against windows and show the windows users what they are missing?
Hi Krish,
My views on Linux being able to replace windows are controversial and will unnecessarily start a flame war. However I do accept that newer distros are moving closer to windows in terms of user friendliness.
Regards,
Rony.
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On 13/09/06, Rony ronbillypop@yahoo.co.uk wrote: My views on Linux being able to replace windows are controversial and will unnecessarily start a flame war. However I do accept that newer distros are moving closer to windows in terms of user friendliness.
it will be the way we compare it. and by the way I too had controvertial views a few years back and we must except the reality that gnu/linux was not user friendly a few (3/4) years back. and we can't expect all to be advanced users. today distros like ubuntu will give a very user friendly desktop and all the applications which are similar or close to similar with windows popular applications. text editor, calculator etc are some simple examples. but openoffice is almost similar and in most ways exactly identical to word, excel etc. I don't find any reason why people must not shift to gnu/linux? Krishnakant.
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Anurag -
Dinesh Joshi -
jtd -
krishnakant Mane -
Rony -
Vihang Dudhalkar -
Vinayak Hegde -
Vivek Rai