Progress with AsteR installation

["T.V. Raman" <tv.raman.tv@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jason,

First off, congratulations on getting things working.

As you learn your way around the code, make sure to use what you
have working; if it can read the test document, it should read
most TeX/LaTeX  content.

Things to play with:

1. Emacs Calculator

You can have the emacs calculator output results in TeX, and use
AsTeR to read them --- there is a helper file in the code that
you load (elisp) -- then hit 'rp' in calc to "read previous"

2. If you have LaTeX  content with new author defined macros --
try writing your own object definitions and reading rules, you
can start as all programmers do -- namely take existing code,
copy it, and modify it till it works.

3. For getting AsTeR  working with other TTS  engines, proceed in
small steps:

Given that you have a DecTalk Express, first  write some code to
AsTeR talk to the DecTalk Express, but using the Emacspeak TCL
server. This should be relatively easy, since Clisp can fork a
sub-process -- so launch tcl from clisp and just write to the
output stream --- you essentially have lsip print out tcl server
commands.

2. Once you have that working, you're half way there -- then,
look for example at outloud-voices.el --- and based on that,
create code in AsTeR that defines the points in speech space for
that synthesizer.

And having a git repos is good, this way you can back out changes
that break, and eventually send me a working patch. Look forward
to it, and hope you have a lot of fun getting there.

Finally, dont use environment variables to tell the code where
the files are located. In the emacspeak distribution, look at how
emacspeak-directory is defined, it's  a useful elisp idiom to
learn  e since it figures out itself where in the filesystem it's placed.

--Raman
-- 
Best Regards,
--raman


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-- 
Best Regards,
--raman


Email			:  raman@xxxxxxxxxxx :ã
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On 4/9/10, Jason White <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> In comparison, while the protocol used by emacspeak may lack a clear
>> formal
>> specification, it has evolved to meet actual requirements rather than
>> theoretical ones. Sometimes, such an approach can result in inefficient or
>> less than optimal design, but provided you are prepared to refactor and
>> refine
>> things as experience increases your knowledge and understanding, you will
>> usually end up with a better result in the end.
>
> There is also the advantage that it has T.V. Raman in charge of it, who
> makes
> sure it's well designed and that it continues to meet the needs of Emacspeak
> users.
>
> Along similar lines, somebody at a W3C conference once suggested to me that
> if
> you really want a superbly designed technical solution to a difficult
> problem,
> bring together 4 or 5 if the best people in the field and give them absolute
> freedom to design the protocol or language that is needed.
>
> Returning to Emacspeak and other non-visual user interface software for
> Linux
> and Unix environments, I also think the success of projects is facilitated
> by
> the extent to which some of the developers are also users. At a minimum, it
> provides a smaller feedback loop than is available under circumstances in
> which the developers aren't intensive users of the software.
>
> I look forward to further developments with AsteR; there is nothing that
> even
> attempts to equal its functionality. Apparently there's a proprietary tool
> which will convert MathML to words that can be read by a screen reader. I'm
> sure I don't need to explain to this audience how primitive that is by
> comparison with the audio formatting, style language and structural browsing
> that AsteR offers. The lack of user interface innovation in "assistive
> technologies" is as apparent as ever - it's still mostly about "screen
> readers" providing access to visual interfaces rather than the design of
> more
> effective auditory (or for that matter, tactile) user interfaces.
>
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