On 17 March 2010 04:17, John-Mark Bell <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have forwarded your email to the development mailing list. Please use > that for communication with the NetSurf developers rather than directly > emailing individuals. > > On Tue, 2010-03-16 at 21:58 +0800, Zhenchao Li wrote: > > Hello, > > I'm a CS student and I'm very interested in implementing netsurf's > > page reader during this summer. > > Thank you for your interest. Please note that NetSurf has not applied to > be a mentoring organisation for GSoC this year as, unfortunately, none > of the potential mentors are able to devote sufficient time to it. > > If you wish to contribute to NetSurf's development outside of GSoC, then > read on. We welcome all contributions but are currently unable to > provide the same level of support you would receive through GSoC. > > > However there's something I don't quite understand: > > > > As most other web browsers do not have this feature, how important > > is it to add such a feature? Is it a most wanted feature? > > It is a project idea that we feel provides sufficient scope for a Summer > of Code project. > > > (Presumably if it's not on the top of the priority list, the > > probability of being accepted as a summer code project is lower. ) > > As I've said above, NetSurf will not be participating in GSoC this year. > > > I noticed this idea was on last year's idea list and it was not > > accepted as a gsoc project. Is it because it was not as important as > > the others or due to lack of good enough proposals? > > It was also on the previous year's ideas list. To date, we have received > no proposal that we believed stood a chance of success. > > > Also I tried building netsurf with espeak library, and managed to > > get espeak read the entire page(text, links, all together). That's > > quite straight forward. Surely page reader should be controlled in a > > intuitive, user-friendly way,(keyboard shortcuts to pause, skip, > > rewind etc) and more options should be added(different voices, > > customizable shortcuts, alternative synthesizer engines etc. ), also > > something more user centric(read page as a depth first tree traversal > > order...(Overview at each level, and then user's interaction to > > proceed to the next level ... )) . > > Correct. > > > but I'm not sure if these features would be enough for a summer's > > work. > > I suspect you'll find that just the above features aren't as simple to > implement as you think. > > If you are still interested, despite our non-participation in GSoC this > year, I advise you to read the archives of the development mailing list > (it's linked from the website). There was some discussion of the above > last year. > > > Ideally one should abstract the underlying synthesis engine from the > > netsurf. > > Again, this was discussed in-depth last year. > > > Does the student have to port it to other operating systems during the > > summer? (If that's the case then it sounds enough for a summer) > > NetSurf has already been ported to many operating systems. What did you > have in mind, here? > > I meant does the student have to port the page reader feature and check it works in all operating systems that already run netsurf. Different OS might use different voice synthesis engine and testing this feature under all these operating systems might take long. > > John. > > > Anyway, thanks for your reply. I will definitely try implementing this feature for fun if I have time this summer :-) -- Homepage: www.fantasticsid.com EMAIL: [email protected] IRC: fantasticsid Jabber: [email protected]
