Dear William and others, thank you very much for your contribution, it is very important that people work on accessibility, on connecting different tools and software synthesis is definitely very important for the future. I'm also happy to see that this concept of interfacing software speech from Speakup that we piloted with Kirk in early 2000 seems to work well. I see that espeakup has some new nice features over speechd-up. It is however also lacking a lot of functionality of speechd-up including some very substantial and developement-costly things: internationalization, audio output handling, configuration and others. It might also initialy seem to be easier to install and run, simplifying the whole thing, but this is a false impression. By bypassing the other accessibility components, it creates a whole new set of problems and bariers for cooperation with other accessibility tools. This is not meant to be criticism as espeakup is in a very early developement stage. For the above reasons, Brailcom would like to join forces with the developers of espeakup to merge the new functionality of these two projects so that we can work together on a full, well-designed and future-sustainable solution. I propose we target at the issues of easiness to install and setup, on filling in the missing capabilities and better integration into the system and into the distributions. Have a nice day, Hynek Hanke
