Hi,
Just got Yasr working with Festival Lite and it seems to work just
fine. A couple of questions related to Yasr and shells, though:
Is there a way of making Festival Lite go faster? I already set the
speed to the maximum in the Yasr options but would prefer something
even higher.
I've noticed that the speed studderes a bit and seems to strangely
accelerate or decelerate at times. I haven't had any problems if
cursoring man pages a line at a time in review mode. However, if it
starts reading a screenful, such as a man page automatically, the
rate seems to vary somewhat and there are slight clicking sounds
also. I'm using an AWE32 card with the OSS drivers, so this might
also affect matters. My machine is a 300 MHz Celeron with 128 MB RAM
and a pre-compiled 2.4 kernel.
One explanation might be that I haven't quite gotten used to the
intonation and rhythm of Festival Lite. It sounds somehow pretty
unpleasant to me considering it's a sample based synth. Yet the
intonation is something out of an early 90s formant synth, well
almost.
Another query, I'd like to do some quite heavy shell customization and
output processing to make matters easier with speech. One important
goal to me is, as reading with speech is basically a sequential
process, getting the most important information first.
In a long ls-listing, I'd like to have the file name first as else I
won't know to which of the listed files all of the other info
applies. As security is important and managable in Linux, I'd like to
have the permission flags next in some speech friendly form,
preferrably as an octal triplet. Then there should be some audible
separator character or a slight pause and then the file size in MB as
well as the date and other info if it fits.
For things like this, which way of customizing would you recommend? Of
course it's worth lookking at what ls offers but I do know there's no
facility for re-ordering the columns. Secondly, I can write and
hopefully read, hhe, some Perl so modding the ls output with that
might also be an option. Howabout other less familiar tools such as
shell scripting or awk for that matter?
Another important thing for me would be to minimize redundancy in
spoken output. I don't know about linux but on other platforms I've
often seen compilers that prepend the full file path before the
actual error message and don't let you customize the format. in a
case like this, the only option is to listen the whole path every
time or else use some read from cursor till end of line command.
For cases like this and other similar issues, I think an optional
redundancy filter might be nice. I suppose this might even be an
original idea, as I haven't seen it implemented in any screen reader
yet. Basically it should compare the previous and current output
line(s) being sent to the screen reader, and kill all alphabetic
sub-strings that have the same starting indeces in the input. Again,
this should be very customizable, maybe as a regex, and the above
suggestion is only the default.
How difficult would it be to create a quick-n-dirty Festival build to
try this out locally on my own machine? I do know C but I'm not
familiar with Linux-specific functions or system calls. I know what
CVS is but that's about it. I already downloaded the sources in
compressed form and it would appear that they are surprisingly clean
and small as there are only a handful of core source files in there.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and more:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila