#12804: Haiku needs a screen reading utility
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Reporter: richienyhus | Owner: nobody
Type: enhancement | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: R2
Component: Applications | Version:
Keywords: | Blocked By:
Blocking: | Has a Patch: 0
Platform: All |
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All modern operating systems now come bundled with a basic level of
accessibility features, namely a screenreader. While these features are
out of scope for Haiku R1, these features should be within the scope of
Haiku R2.
Screen readers are made up of three parts:
A backend Speech synthesis system
An API for 1stparty & 3rdparty access to the Speech synthesis library
An OS bundled screen reading utility for accessibility
For instance, [https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca Orca] is the Gnome
screen reader that communicates with the Accessibility Toolkit via the AT-
SPI API. In Android you have Google Text-to-Speech, which is used by
Google Talkback to provide speech feedback on what is being enacted,
displayed or selected. In Windows, Microsoft Narrator uses the Microsoft
Speech API.
BeOS did have 3rd party applications, TalkBox used the festival synthesis
library and [https://github.com/HaikuArchives/SpeakIt SpeakIt] which used
a database of spoken words. The author of TalkBox has offered to open
source it in the past. However before creating or adapting an utility, we
need a speech synthesis library for it to use.
||= Library =||= Language =||= Licence =||
|| [https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/ espeak-ng] ;|| C || GPL ||
|| [http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ festival] ;|| C++ || MIT
||
|| [http://www.eguidedog.net/ekho.php EkonFain for CKJ] ;|| C++ || GPL
||
|| [http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ praat] ;|| C++ || GPL ||
|| [http://festvox.org/flite/ CMU's flite] || C++ || MIT ||
Both 'Festival' and CMU's 'Festival Lite' use the
[http://festvox.org/festvox/ FestVox] dev tool. These two would be the
best choice, with the lightweight flite as default and hevywight Festival
swapped in if needed.
--
Ticket URL: <https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/12804>
Haiku <https://dev.haiku-os.org>
Haiku - the operating system.
