Re: plugging other language voices

Willie Walker wrote:
>   Theoretically, an assistive technology can talk to
>   multiple speakers from multiple drivers, with the
main
>   limitation being audio device contention between 
>   multiple speech synthesis engines.

Yes, this is a very low level access from the AT's point of
view, but as 
long as it is implemented within the Gnome Speech layer I
don't think 
this really matters for Orca itself, since the language
(locale) 
information is already exposed to the Orca Speech API.  I am
able to 
make use of the locale information immediately in the Speech
Dispatcher 
backend, since Speech Dispatcher takes care of all the lower
level 
details of language switching for us (for example it is
possible to use 
different synthesizers for different languages).

So I can see two *independent* problems in making Orca
multi-lingual:

   1) Providing the correct locale information in all text
being spoken
      by Orca using the existing 'locale' ACSS attribute.

   2) Implementing language switching according to this
information in
      different speech systems.  This is about a one minute
job for
      Speech Dispatcher.   With Gnome Speech this is a
little more work,
      but still doable, I believe.

The advantage is the independence of these two problems, so
I believe we 
can start experimenting right now.  I can add this
functionality to the 
Speech Dispatcher backend as soon as the locale information
within the 
ACSS attributes provides some reasonable values.  Currently
I prefer to 
ignore this information, since it always contains 'english',
but it 
makes sense to switch the default language according to
current locale 
(most of the text produced by Orca is in the current
locale's language).

So if Orca sets the locale information to the current locale
by default 
and changes it for any part of speech to a different
language, Speech 
Dispatcher will respect that.  This way Orca could for
example set the 
locale according to the locale of the current application
being accessed 
or of a web page being viewed.

Hope this makes sense.  Tomas



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