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There is software speech for Linux, though I think it's not as widely used as hardware-based speech.
As you correctly note, internal synthesizers and external ones are supported. Speakup, for example, only supports
hardware synths, though it does support both external and serial port synths and one internal, ISA slot synth.
In recent years many of us have used an IBM software called ViaVoice with emacspeak. ViaVoice is no longer available
officially from IBM, though copies can be found on the Internet. Increasingly, however, this older ViaVoice no longer
works with newer Linux distributions. It is possible that ViaVoice for Linux may be back when Gnopernicus comes on the
scene. Meanwhile, there is Festival Lite, or Flite, which is suppolrted by both emacspeak and yasr through something
called eflite. Also, there's a java based front end to flite in the FreeTTS software speech application written by Sun
Microsystems.
And, just to finish this topic off, future versions of Speakup are very likely to support software speech.
I hope this answers your question. Here are some web links:
http://eflite.sf.net
http://freetts.sf.net
Carin Headrick writes:
> From: "Carin Headrick" <headrick2001@rogers.com>
>
> This is probably a dumb question, but I had a friend ask me if all synths
> supported by linux screen-readers had to be external. I said they had to be
> hardware, but not necessarily external. Is this correct?
>
> Thanks for putting up with me,
>
> Carin
> ---------
> Check out my little website at http://www.uoguelph.ca/~cheadric.
>
>
>
>
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>
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--
Janina Sajka, Director
Technology Research and Development
Governmental Relations Group
American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
Email: janina@afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175
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