Re: Package proposal: greader, an audio emacs reader for blind and dislexic people

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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I'm not sure I follow. With the exception of the references to the back-end
TTS, I don't see anything in your proposed package that the other packages
don't already do. I can see that Emacspeak may be too sophisticated with
too much additional functionality that is not needed, such as session
information, but the primary purpose is to turn buffers into text. However,
Emacspeak is somewhat 'invasive', so I can appreciate that it may be
overkill for what you want. This is why I suggest you look at speechd.el,
which does not modify Emacs behaviour to the extent of Emacspeak and
essentially just takes buffer contents and sends them to speech-dispatcher.

I would not discount speech-dispatcher as a possible backend. I find
current versions stable and reliable. Having written a number of speech
services in the past, I know first hand how complex implementing a reliable
and functional interface is. There are a lot of hidden details which only
become obvious when you start to use the system. For example, when reading
a large buffer, being able to pause speech and restart from the position
you paused at while at the same time, ensuring that text is sent in
sufficiently large chunks to enable the TTS engine to turn it into good
quality speech  (chunk size is often critical to this), handling various
UTF characters, filtering out text which you don't want spoken (consider a
horizontal line of -----, do you want it to speak "horizontal line" or do
you want it to say 'dash' 80 times or say nothing, what is the 'cuitoff'
point ) etc. Implementing a proof of concept is fairly trivial, but
implementing something robust and usable is much much harder.

Tim

On Wed, 30 Jan 2019 at 18:09, Michelangelo Rodriguez <
michelangelo.rodriguez@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, 30 Jan 2019, Tim Cross wrote:
>
> > nIn addition to emacspeak, there is also a package called speechd.el,
> which also does a similar thing, but uses speech-dispatcher.
> > My question would be why create yet another package which appears to do
> the same thing rather than contribute to one of the other packages - what
> is it about your package that is fundamentally different to either
> emacspeak (very
> > comprehensive, robust and powerful, with a well developed underlying
> philosophy/approach) and speechd.el (minimalist, simple and lower learning
> curve)?
> >
> Hi,
> Greader is not an accessibility tool for emacs. It is specialized on
> reading contents of buffers, not in providing information about emacs
> sessions.
> Greader is based on back-ends architecture, so does not depend on a
> single package (eg. on speech-dispatcher) that is known to be buggy, and
> back-ends for espeak and speech-dispatcher are already provided.
> Greader has the possibility to make "audiobooks", switable to be listened
> with mobile devices.
> In other words, greader serves a different purpose if compared to
> emacspeak and speechd-el, that are indeed great packages.
> Yes, i considered the iidea of integrating greader into one of those
> packages, but it can result in a confusion, because as i sayd, that
> packages are semantically different.
> >
> > On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 20:15, Michelangelo Rodriguez <
> michelangelo.rodriguez@gmail.com> wrote:
> >       Hi All,
> >       I would to propose a package that reads countinuously a buffer,
> using
> >       speech synthesis.
> >       It exists a package called emacspeak that makes emacs accessible,
> but my
> >       package is somewhat different:
> >       It does not depend on emacspeak, and can use espeak or
> speech-dispatcher
> >       to perform reading.
> >       It is my first package for emacs, and apart to make it available
> to all,
> >       i'm interested on suggestions on how to make my code better.
> >       The project is at very earl stage of development, though it works
> already.
> >       So, what is the next step?
> >       thanks to all for feedback.
> >       Michelangelo Rodriguez
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > regards,
> >
> > Tim
> >
> > --
> > Tim Cross
> >
> >
> >



-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

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