Hi Folks: It has been awhile since we had any discussion of various speakup projects and their status. I thought maybe I should share a list of projects I/we are working on and maybe give a little status report/comment for each one. This idea was initiated by a conversation I was having with Steve Dawes on the reflector last night. We were talking about the availability or lack there of for a program to do caller id anunciation when the phone rings. Sort of a cool idea in my opinion for using voice capable modems to do caller id. I'll put it on the list below. I have noticed over time that we are starting to get quite a group of coders here on the list. If any of you are interested in getting involved with any of these projects it will certainly be appreciated. Our team of active developers is quite small and so our projects don't make a lot of headway very quickly. Please remember you don't necessarily need to be a good programmer or one at all to be involved in these projects. All projects have other rolls which are required for the completion and availability of them, such as web page writing and maintanance. Cvs coordination and documentation are two other examples of tasks which are important to any project. Of course, no project ever reaches the light of day without coders dedicated to seeing the project through to fruition. speakup speech console for Linux This is probably our most complete and visible project. Currently we are working on a number of aspects. Rewriting portions of the code so that it will meet the linux kernel developers approval for inclusion in the standard kernel tree. I have been a bit lax on this because of other responcibilities and projects. Driver modulization is currently under active development. This will allow us to load and unload synthesizer drivers at will so that we can finally include drivers for devices which are either farily large or require resources unavailable at the early stages of boot-up such as tuxtalk or a Dectalk-pc driver. Cut and paste between consoles is scheduled as the next task after modularization, it will make it possible to mark sections of one console to be copied over to another console. The reasons for this are things like copying a html URL or text from one system to another. After that a Dectalk PC driver so that we can provide linux as a viable alternative for people which use that synth as their main access to computers. There are many other items on the todo list but those are the main ones on the go currently. More hands would of course make these get implemented a lot faster. awesome professional audio editing system for text based consoles This one is sort of on hold currently. Not because it isn't a worthwhile project but because there are a number of other programs/packages which have potential to provide the same basic capability. Frank and Jeromey have been working with Paul Davis on Arder and I have been playing with the idea of a ncurses interface for ecasound. This is one of those projects that everyone uses an excuse for why they are not quite willing to give up Windows because of a lack of availability. Kind of funny that there aren't very many blinks actively working on it though. EBTAFS port back to Linux Electronic Braille Translation and Formatting system. This one is sad and very stupid. Ebtafs is my braille translator which I originally wrote back in the 80's with help from at least one other active speakup user, for doing braille translation. It is a textbook style translator which provides automatic contents building, volume splitting and hand inclusion of nemith code or foreign languages. Darcy ported it over to linux last fall but though a stupid oversight on my part we lost it all when the automated accounting system on speech removed his account before I realized what was going on. Sorry Darcy, this bothers me a lot because of all the hard work you put in. Needless to say, it all needs doing again. OCR system for Linux This one has also gone through a number of revisions. It is the other reason people always give for why they are not quite willing to give up on Microsoft. We originally found a doctoral project which we did a large chunk of work on to bend it to our ways. That work is still available in cvs under the name socrates. Meanwhile back at the rest of the world project, there is another group of people actively developing a system known as gocr/jocr. Their work is comparable to socrates and in some case moving forward faster than we can move socrates forward. We are now working on a ncurses interface to libgocr and will probably give socrates a lot more flexibility and power in the long haul. It also has the considerable advantage of having a number of people working on it around the world. html preprocessor for ebtafs This one isn't even started because of the lack of availability of ebtafs. It is basically a program to convert html tags into ebtafs tags. xml browser and player for new digital talking book standard The national libraries services of the government and the daisy consortium have been developing standards for a new digital talking book format. A number of organizations around the world are coming up with commercial devices and software packages for windows. This project is to develop a gnu project for linux. I have one person currently actively working on it. He is still a student and not blind so he is strugling with the concepts of blindness issues and reading other peoples code. He is making progress though and hopefully will get things pieced together with code at some point in the future. The standards are not exactly trivial to get your head wrapped around technically anyway. command line real audio player without X This project was taken on by Matt Campbell and he's done a wonderful job of it. It is called trplayer and many of you are familiar with it already. There is a mailing list and a web page and Matt's the man to ask about any details or ideas. projects web page with subpages for each project. Well, this is probably selfexplanitory and doesn't exist yet. We would like to have a page for each project with the projects current status, who's working on it, how to get involved and a number of issues. This is a good example where programming expertise isn't necessary, but desire to help and a good work ethic are necessary. software synth good quality based on rsynth It isn't currently what I'd call good quality, but it is working and called tuxtalk. It is in cvs for anyone wanting to play with it. It still needs a lot of work and is not a trivial project. Speech synthesis is state of the art so the field is moving forward faster than the packages can keep up. This one has an emphasis on smallness because it is scheduled to be the first software synth for speakup so it needs to be loadable as a module. We have already modified it to accept in stream commands based on the DoubleTalk. It currently supports rate and pitch change, punctuation levels and most important instant shutting up. We need someone to take on contacting all of the original authors of rsynths pieces of code so that it can become a bonifide gnu project. Of course once again we need coders interested in speech synthesis. Speak Freely modifications and enhancements Our favourite internet audio package is speak freely. It allows people to talk and type/chat over the internet in realtime. It has fairly good audio quality and is available for linux and windows. We use it as our speakup reflector where people get together to help each other, ask questions, do project design, general bullshit and gossip about people not on the reflector! 'grin' If you are interested in getting involved in a speakup project it probably would behoove you to set it up and get on the reflector. We have made a number of significant advances in it's feature set and are continuely working on it. Caller id daemon I thought that Steve's idea was cool, so I am making a project for it at least in name. This would use a voice capable modem to monitor the phone line and announce the number and maybe other information when the phone rings. It would then blast that information either to the console or as synthetic audio to advise the user of who's calling. There is one other project which is under active development that I cannot announce openly here. Many of you are already familiar with it through your active participation. If you are just beside yourself with curiosity, you can either get on the reflector and ask or find someone else involved and ask them. It's worth it. If you have other projects you would ike to work on and would like them part of the speakup project, post them and let us have a look. If you would like to get involved with any of these projects greate! We have way more projects then we have people working on. If you are just interested in being an armchair designer, you might as well piss-off. There are very many exciting things to work on and getting should'd to death just generates frustration. Get involved and help develop packages for the blind community or the linux community in general. It will make yu feel good about your part in the overall machine and will make others appreciate you as a contributor. Once again, I wish to thank all of the folks that have in the past and those still working on the various projects. I couldn't do it without you and would certainly not be as happy not getting to know you. We make significant advances as a team and it's always fun when it works. Kirk
