Dear all, Found the below post worthy of being shared and petition deserving of being signed in great numbers. Even non-Gujarati speakers are free to sign and vote on the petition to express their support:
Dear all, I would like to cordially represent the Gujarati TTS committee, consisting of a group of visually impaired individuals in collaboration with an organisation striving to bring about some more alternatives and options in the Gujarati text to speech engine language reading space. To brief you about this technology, text to speech engines, also known as speech synthesizers, are software packages that render text as synthetic and verbalized speech. TTS technology is employed by screen readers, e-book readers, document viewers and even many mainstream applications and cater not only to visually impaired people like those in our committee, but may also be beneficial to elderly people who cannot read, or those having a learning disability. With assistive and accessibility technology significantly advancing, fortunately, modern text to speech engines support a vast variety of languages around the world, including many Indian as well as foreign regional languages. However, Gujarati is one which has no high quality speech synthesis available, leaving our state of Gujarat and its visually impaired, learnin disabled and elderly population a step behind other competitors. We want to change this, our goal is to spur and initiate the development of Gujarati language supporting text to speech software, and as part of a larger project towards devising solutions and contacting those experienced in this industry, we have also sent word to Google and its text to speech development team, requesting for the same. They raise a valid concern, how big is the demand in the community for the Gujarati language, how massive and beneficial would it be to prioritize an Indian language, how fruitful would an Asian language support implementation prove? To exemplify our gargantuam interest, we have started an online petition calling upon Google to incorporate Gujarati language reading support in Google text to speech engine, and we can reach our target only with your help. Will you help us in this endeavour? Do you think Gujaratis deserve access to their mother tongue with independence in a quality voice? Do you think we should have equal reach to our beloved language despite disabilities or diversities? If so, please help us by signing this petition we have created which Google is closely monitoring, and contribute your invaluable signatures and votes at https://www.change.org/p/google-can-make-it-by-adding-a-high-quality-voice-to-google-tts-for-the-gujarati-want-to-have-gujarati-text-to-speech-in-gujarati-language?recruiter= Only with your and the community’s involvement and fully extended cooperation can this movement bear fruit, and it is you, whom we are counting on, to sign this petition yourself, get signatures from your friends and family, and spread the word about this noble cause of ours! We would be hugely grateful towards any vote you may wish to lend to this petition, and we sincerely appreciate all the time you have dedicated to our efforts. Best Regards, Gujarati TTS Committee Thanks. -- Warm Regards Bhavya Shah Using NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access) free and open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows To download a copy of the free screen reader NVDA, please visit http://www.nvaccess.org/ Using Google Talkback on Motorolla G second generation Lollipop 5.0.2 Reach me through the following means: Mobile: +91 7506221750 E-mail id: bhavya.shah...@gmail.com Skype id : bhavya.09 Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
