We would like to announce the new project, which is a part of free-b-software project. Free-b-software is intended to make free software which would help visually impaired people to work with computers and to use the Internet. Free-b-software is the common project of: Foundation for the Blind (http://www.brailcom.cz/fond/fond.html), Brailcom o.p.s. (http://www.brailcom.cz/EN/) and Czech Free Software Foundation (http://www.freesoft.cz). Our new project is called speechd and it is intended to provide a device independent layer for speech synthesis. It should have a simple interface for client applications (applications, that want to speak) as well as for device driver modules (for particular speech synthesis). Anyone, who would like to cooperate is welcome. We need any ideas or comments of people interested in this problem. If you can for example provide a specification of any speech synthesis device, which might be used with speechd, you are welcome. If you are able to write a module for such a device, you are always welcome. But the first goal is to design a good API for output modules and application protocol. Of course, this is a non-commercial activity and we search for the companies and people who would like support us any way. For more information about speechd project, please visit it's homepage at http://freebsoft.freesoft.cz/projects/speechd -- Jan Buchal Tel: (00420 2) 24921679
