Dear Paul, Jean-Philippe, Fellow TTS members and a11y members,
Paul's email has raised some important considerations.
Just some further clarification while we gather/await opinions from other TTS and a11y team members:
1) Apologies for not being clear with regard to speech-dispatcher. I had not considered this for the TTS group since
I assumed it fell directly within a11y group's expertise. Is this the opinion of a11y team members?
2) I had not formed an opinion with regard to festival-freebsoft-utils. It would appear to lie right on the border
between TTS and a11y programs which drive TTS. All of this package is written in festival's Scheme implementation.
It is a small package and I would not want it to be long orphaned.
For TTS group - uses same Scheme dialect which TTS group maintains for festival - maintainence burden would be low.
For a11y group - freebsoft-utils is closely tied to speech-dispatcher - a11y group has more users which would be doing
on going testing of this functionality.
If a11y do not pick it up, I would say that TTS probably would feel a strong moral obligation to pick up freebsoft-utils.
It has a fairly high popcon (people find it useful) and links closely with the festival/spech-tools packages we maintain.
In a sense it is really the glue program between our two groups. I look forward to your opinions.
I look forward to this continuing dialogue,
very best regards,
Peter Drysdale