Randy McMurchy wrote: >I put the FreeTTS package into the BLFS book a long time ago. At the time, >there was a sight-impaired reader of the BLFS book who asked if there was >anything that could be done to assist her with 'reading' the book. It was >for that reason I put FreeTTS in the book. Flite and Festival might be >better options, I do not know. Flight builds easily, but I have not tested >it.
I think it's great when people can find ways to make systems more accessible. We were discussing text to speech on the Schoolforge list because someone on the list is teaching a dyslexic student. She's finding tools that get information across as video or words work better than the student trying to read text in that situation. I've built festival lite and espeak from scratch. Festival looks more complicated than festival lite. Haven't tried festival at this point. I did hear some interesting comments as to which application might be better festival lite or espeak. Some people find espeak easier to understand while some people prefer festival and festival lite's features and don't think espeak can do as much. I also ran across a project someone was working on to use CMU Sphinx to understand voice commands and script carrying those commands out. The project also made use of festival lite. Tried building CMU Sphinx 2 and that also didn't present any major problems. However, the developer thought PocketSphinx might be a better way to go since it was more actively developed. Haven't looked at the source for that yet. They do look like they could be interesting tools if one wanted to script more speech capability into one's system. Aleksandar Kuktin >Looks like it is high time for someone to write a browser from scratch. I have been looking for that. I think a lot of low resource Linux distributions have wanted a browser that could handle HTML5 (or at least HTML4), CSS (2 or 3) and JavaScript functionality and still not take a ton of dependencies or require a complicated build process. Really not thrilled when one has to jump through hoops just to build an application. However, with a modern browser, there does not seem to be a good example of one where that isn't the case. Guess it's not that big of a surprise, because I've also been looking for a good server-side JavaScript implementation. Most of them have lots of prerequisites you need to meet before you build them as well. Most of them are based on either v8 (from Chrome) or spidermonkey (from Mozilla). None of the options I've tried so far have a nice straightforward build process. They require you to build special tools just so you can build the application. I'm sure there would be a lot of people who would be thrilled if they could find a decent browser project that offered good functionality, worked decently in a low memory, slower processor environment and wasn't very compilicated to compile and build. I've run across several browser projects out there, but I haven't seen one fill that void yet. Also, typical Chrome users are going to download it from Google or their distribution. They'll care more about how well it performs as a browser rather than how hard it is to build. The most popular programs often aren't the ones that are easiest to compile. It's hard to find people with the perspective to recommend software that not only works well but builds easily too. Most people just look at the end results. That's one nice thing about Linux from Scratch developers/users. They get to see both sides. Sincerely, Laura -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
