Hello Samuel, lists, On 19/11/2024 14:17, Samuel Thibault wrote:
Cc-ing debian-accessibility at least for information. Roland Clobus, le mar. 19 nov. 2024 12:31:15 +0100, a ecrit:The most striking recording is at step 2:6:1 https://openqa.debian.net/tests/325775/file/bootwalk_2:6:1-captured.wav which is about 5 minutes long and lists 78 language options.Yes. One can use arrow keys instead to quickly go over the list.
...
(I've noticed e.g. 'Chinese letter - Chinese letter' being spoken at 1:00) -> i.e. should the list of languages be reduced for this specific variant of the installer, because the speech module cannot read it?Ideally that could be implemented in localechooser, by looking at the list of voices in espeak to filter the list.
The next screen typically works fine, so there appears no need for removing some languages from this list.
However, could localechooser use a pre-rendered pronunciation for the language-selection question (activated only when espeak is active)?
E.g.: # Prerendering of the language file: echo "Ελληνικά" | espeak-ng -x -v el # Then the line would become "28: Greek - [[,elinik'a]]"
* Could a different font be used to show the UTF-8 characters, similar to the text installer?For the screen reader to work, we have to use the linux console, not an fbterm. So we are limited to the linux console capability, and thus cannot display everything at the same time. In practice this is not a problem because the speech is correct, and the font is switched once a language is selected.
When I posted my first mail, I stopped looking after the first screen.For Greek (28) the spelling of each letter becomes fluent greek (instead of spelling each single letter) in the next screen and the font is updated as well. For Vietnamese (77) and Arabic (4) the next screens also look and sound good to me (I don't speak these languages).
* The spoken text 'Prompt. For help' does not speak the most important bit, i.e. that the question mark will show the help textThis is https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=690343 forwarded upstream https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/issues/150
With no upstream activity since 2016, should the text in the installer be changed?
E.g. from "Prompt: '?' for help" to "Prompt: enter a question mark for help"
* Nowadays newer TTS voices exist that speak a more natural language (e.g. piper https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/), could this be used instead?The problem is the size. espeak-ng supports a very wide range of languages with a quite small disk footprint. Piper etc. (we had mbrola already for a long time) take a *lot* of space. We have packages ready for including e.g. mbrola voices, but we cannot really include them on the default images, it's rather for specialized images.
I noticed that mbrola is in contrib, and the voices in non-free/sound. The license conditions are severely restrictive, in the sense that the voices are to be used only by mbrola, which cannot be guaranteed in a generic installation of Debian.
Piper has a MIT license and the voices appear to be less restrictive, but I didn't look at it too deeply.
Regarding size: perhaps the netinst image cannot handle the growth, but e.g. a GNOME live image (already at 4GB) can have a bit more. Or there could even be an a11y live image (or are there already Debian derivatives that handle this?)
With kind regards, Roland
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