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Re: Accessibility talk at the GNU Hackers Meeting



Ei,

Le 30/08/2013 23:37, Reece Dunn a écrit :
On 30 August 2013 20:40, Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@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)




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