Re: MAGic and COM
- From: Andreas Stefik <stefika@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 11:24:47 -0600
Hi folks,
I'll try to answer everyone's questions:
1. Phonemic will definitely be released outside of NetBeans. In fact,
we've spent significant development time to make this happen. We're
also making our programming language, Hop, available outside of
NetBeans as a separate interpreter as well soon, either for 2.0 or
2.5, depending on how long it takes. You can actually build a "nearly"
feature complete version of phonemic outside of NetBeans right now,
and we've converted over our entire code base in Sodbeans to this new
architecture, as of last week, in the 2.0 branch. Even as of right
now, you can simply load our Java library into any java project and
get screen reader TTS support out of the box.
2. For Jim, as for how it "knows" which system to use, we have a
series of programs, written in Objective C, C, Java, and some console
scripts, that try to detect what is available on the system, which
appear to be working internally in the Sodbeans 2.0 in NetBeans AND
outside of NetBeans, on windows, linux (including vinux and ubuntu),
and mac.
3. For Jim's second question, this one is complicated. Not all TTS
engines and screen readers have the same capabilities, and it is very
difficult to get everything to match up perfectly. Our current
solution for this, which we're still implementing, is to make standard
interfaces for Speed, Pitch, Etc, and queryable methods (e.g.,
CanBlock, CanUsePriorities, CanChangePitch), that allow you to query
the current engine and change it if another is available, which you
can query for. Further, since all pitch, speed, etc, is standardized,
we are working on documentation that shows exactly how our
standardized speed metrics, for example, map out to the various
technologies, like SAPI or JAWS. We're testing some of this by ear, as
many of these systems just aren't standardized at all.
4. For Jamal, we've been meaning to add windows eyes support, but we
went for adding ORCA and Linux support for our next release, as it has
been, by far, the biggest request we've received from folks on the
screen reader support side. I really, really, want to add support for
this, though, but I don't think we have the development time for it
before the 2.0 release of Sodbeans. If you or someone else has any
interest in adding support in, I certainly wouldn't complain!
5. And finally, phonemic is a first-class citizen in Hop, which means,
after 2.0, you can make a speech object that has all of these
capabilities completely out-of-the box in one line of code, or if you
want more advanced phonemic features, you can connect to our speech
libraries, which allow for all of this stuff, or will, at release. Hop
then handles callling down to phonemic and making all of the
appropriate operating system and screen reader/tts engine specific
calls.
Hope that helps. We really want something similar for magnification
... we'll see how it goes.
Stefik
On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 9:50 AM, QuentinC <quentinc@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello Stefik,
> Do you have planed to release that speech API alone outside of netbeans ?
> Because I'm interested in it but reallly not in netbeans.
>
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