XFCE screen reader

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Stephan Arts wrote:
> The screen-reader seems to be the easy part, a speech-synthesizer is
> going to be harder. ORCA uses existing speech-synthesizers, and as far
> as my limited experience goes, it has a hard time doing so. If we want
> a reliable screen-reader, it might be an idea to develop one
> ourselves.

This is an illusion.

Just remove from orca everything except support for speech-dispatcher, which is 
itself a multiplexer over a few speech synthesis engines, and depends on nothing 
except them. speech-dispatcher runs as a daemon from bootscripts and listens to 
a port on localhost. Blind people are likely to have speech-dispatcher already 
installed, because this is the only way to connect speakup (a kernel patch for 
reading the text console) to a software speech synthesizer.

Espeak also looks promising (due to support of non-English languages), but it is 
accessible via speech-dispatcher anyway.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov