[oats-sig] other stuff for writing and reading support ...

Hi all,

Thanks Mats, some very good points. I can make a few  broad comments
based on my contacts with the community but the best thing would be to
post to project mailing lists. The GNOME a11y and www.a11y.org mailing
lists would probably be the best places to start. I could forward for
you if you like but you would then not see any responses. (This is an
interesting issue for OATSoft in itself, how to co-ordinate across
channels).

Orca is moving fast so may have more reading support features now, but
I take your point that it's full features are overkill for this use.
It supports magnification. You could ask the Orca project group and
they may well know of other more suitable projects.

The Firefox Addon CLiCk, speak is one useful open source tool. It can
be used with web applications (e.g. google documents) and is cross
platform. It is based on the same code library as FireVox.
http://clickspeak.clcworld.net/

While I'm not completely up to speed on TTS eSpeak (
http://espeak.sourceforge.net) seems to have a good range of voices
and comes with Ubuntu (say) and is I believe the preferred engine for
Orca. TTSynth has a range of languages (Swedish is not currently
listed though). Linux sound infrastructure is an issue as it is rather
fragmented but there are efforts to resolve it in order to make TTS
more straight forward (ALSA look favourite).

Open Komodo Labs are looking at simple voice guestures but I'm not
aware of much other voice input. I know that Willie, the Orca lead has
worked in this are so may be able to say what the current state is.

listenup is a DAISY player but does not appear to be enduser ready and
is perhaps the one you are thinking of? There has been mention of ODF
to DAISY translation and now MS have announced a plugin for OpenXML
there may be renewed effort and that could conceivably lead to an
interest players.

For AAC there is the  Bliss variant of Dasher and GOK may have some
suitable features.

It occurs to me that if anyone is interested in working on improving
these areas they could investigate the availability of Mozilla
Foundation accessibility grants as they cover a wide range of
accessibility issues.

Steve

On 20/11/2007, mats.lundalv at vgregion.se <mats.lundalv at vgregion.se> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm just now trying to sum up the situation we've found here in Sweden
> concerning the poor situation in the Linux environment for students - and
> users in general - who need support for their writing and reading problems.
> There is a really problematic lack of appropriate tools in most areas -
> apart from the word list and prediction stuff we have been discussing:
>
> - No appropriate TTS support tools for this group - as ORCA and other screen
> readers for the profoundly visually impaired (without additional
> disabilitieas) both lack important functionality and impose too much
> functionality for these users. We would need a project/group that for
> example made an alternative version of ORCA - provided a setup to strip off
> the specific features for context reporting etc for the visually impaired -
> and added the functionality and interface needed for the larger group of
> users with some kind of print impairement other than visual. It should be
> very doable, as the basic speech, as well as screen and key reading
> functionality is already there, and there are several well established tools
> in the Windows and Mac worlds to use as template specs.
>
> - We of course also need access to a wider range of better TTS voices for
> most languages - both free and commercial - for this range of users.
>
> - Lack of usable speech input products (in particular multi lingual), either
> free or commercial
>
> - Lack of usable tools for management and OCR of scanned text (including the
> TTS support of course). The ones I've found (but not yet tried) seem to be
> primitive and of questionable value. Good enough OCR is of course a
> tremendous task. (Any research resources available somewhere waiting to be
> released to the OS communities?) Access to existing commercial resources may
> be a more realistic path here?
>
> - Lack of product ready DAISY readers (a couple of dead or dormant projects
> - the most recent - 1½ year old - and promising seems to be the Norwegian
> student work for Skolelinux "The DaisyPlayer Project" - but only half way to
> product I'm afraid?). A bit surprising, as this should be a high common
> priority also for the visually impaired?
>
> - Lack of tailored spell, homophone and homograph checkers (in all/most
> languages)
>
> - Total lack of course for AAC support in general, and linked to reading and
> writing / literacy support needs in particular. A first step here would be
> an OSK with support for not only text, but also grafics and sound/speech,
> and user friendly tailoring - based on SAW5-The Grid-Clicker like
> functionality.
>
> What, apart from most of the details, have I missed out?
> There is definitely still a lot to do in these areas ;-)
> Any tips of useful resources are welcome!
>
> Cheers,
> Mats

-- 
Steve Lee
--
Jambu - Alternative Access to Computers
www.fullmeasure.co.uk