Re: [OT] Anything simpler than emacspeak?
On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 at 7:34am, Karsten M. Self wrote:
:on Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 12:15:15PM -0500, Patrick Wiseman (pwiseman@mindspring.com) wrote:
:> Hello, all:
:>
:> I'm trying to set up a Debian laptop (so this is not _completely_
:> offtopic :) for my Dad, whose sight has almost failed. I have bought
:> Fonix's DECtalk software, and it works quite nicely on the command
:> line (i.e. it "speaks" what I type), but the only application I can
:> find which uses it is emacspeak, which has way too steep a learning
:> curve and in any event is much more than Dad needs, which is basically
:> web-browsing (lynx would be good) and email (for which I'd set him up
:> with mutt or pine). I tried screader, but couldn't get it to work
:> with DECtalk's 'say' program; and its documentation is so sketchy, I
:> couldn't begin to diagnose the problem.
:>
:> Any help will be much appreciated, and I'll report back (and probably
:> create a website) so that anyone else wanting to set up a minimal but
:> functional "talking" system will be able to do it more easily!
:
:There's 'festival', a text-to-speech program (English and American
:accents available ;-). It can be configured to take input as stdin and
:read out the text. I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for.
That's more or less the idea. DECtalk's 'say' is supposed to take input
as stdin, too, but 'echo "Say something" | say' doesn't do anything :(
:I've played with it a little bit -- mostly setting it up to read fortune
:output at random intervals (to annoy cow-orkers, of course ;-), or to
:announce system issues (e.g.: "can't reach $HOST"), though I've also
:piped lynx output through it.
Again, that's more or less what I have in mind (piping lynx, not annoying
people :), although a functional screen reader would probably be more
useful. screader didn't produce any sound, and also messed up the screen
contents; I'm trying to modify yasr (which is in perl, with which I have a
fair amount of familiarity) to support DECtalk.
:It works. Sort of. Not sure what exactly your goals are though.
:
:BTW, my understanding of emacspeak was that it required a voice card --
:hardware to actually generate the output. The nice thing about festival
:is that it works with a standard audio card.
The current version of emacspeak, 17.0, supports the DECtalk software,
which speaks through a standard sound card. That much I have
working. Maybe I just have to bite the bullet and tell Dad he's going to
have to learn emacs! Unfortunately, that might be enough of a barrier to
dissuade him.
Cheers,
Patrick
--
Patrick Wiseman pwiseman@mindspring.com
Linux user #17943 *Google First, Ask Later*
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