The direct option is supposed to allow a softsynth like espeakup handle special characters and individual characters rather than attempting to do it uniformly like we've been doing in speakup for many years. We have been talking about it on-and-off for a while now on the irc channel and decided it needs testing so we can get the kinks worked out for languages other than English. For characters such as umlauts and other accents you would need to have the appropriate utf-8 character set loaded into the kernel. If you have than thank you for the apraisal. We realize it still needs work but without folks trying it we can't fix it. Both William Hubbs and I are native English speakers and although I speak a little German I've not really played with getting my softsynth to use it so we really need patient help from speakers of other languages. Kirk -- Kirk Reiser The Computer Braille Facility e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca University of Western Ontario phone: (519) 661-3061
