Dear Paul, Jean-Philippe, Fellow TTS members and a11y members, Paul's email has raised some important considerations.
Just some further clarification while we gather/await opinions from other TTS and a11y team members: 1) Apologies for not being clear with regard to speech-dispatcher. I had not considered this for the TTS group since I assumed it fell directly within a11y group's expertise. Is this the opinion of a11y team members? 2) I had not formed an opinion with regard to festival-freebsoft-utils. It would appear to lie right on the border between TTS and a11y programs which drive TTS. All of this package is written in festival's Scheme implementation. It is a small package and I would not want it to be long orphaned. For TTS group - uses same Scheme dialect which TTS group maintains for festival - maintainence burden would be low. For a11y group - freebsoft-utils is closely tied to speech-dispatcher - a11y group has more users which would be doing on going testing of this functionality. If a11y do not pick it up, I would say that TTS probably would feel a strong moral obligation to pick up freebsoft-utils. It has a fairly high popcon (people find it useful) and links closely with the festival/spech-tools packages we maintain. In a sense it is really the glue program between our two groups. I look forward to your opinions. I look forward to this continuing dialogue, very best regards, Peter Drysdale