Espeak as default text to speech engine on LiveCD

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
Would it be possible for espeak to be made the default text to speech 
engine on the LiveCD?

Reasons for why making the change:
* At the moment the LiveCD comes with festival but this is slow in 
comparison to espeak. This means that for users of tools such as orca, 
the information presented is delayed and so makes the system appear 
unresponsive. This is particularly emphasised at points where orca may 
be slow to respond anyway (eg. if the system is under some load or focus 
is in a large and/or complicated GUI structure).
* Espeak comes with support for many languages where as festival is 
limited (I believe the LiveCD only has one language for festival).
* I believe espeak is more compact than festival. This is particularly 
true when considering the number of languages supported by espeak.
* Espeak seems to be more controllable than festival. I don't really 
notice any change in festival when I adjust the speech rate in orca, I 
do get a change with espeak. This is important as if the speech output 
is too fast for a user then they cannot understand it and so cannot use 
the system, if it is too slow this is frustrating as it makes the use of 
the system unnecessarily slow.

What is required for espeak to be used by orca? The two packages needed 
are espeak and gnome-speech-espeak. If the festival packages are removed 
then orca will use espeak by default, if festival is not removed then 
users can choose between the two.

I hope you will consider changing this on the LiveCD as it should 
improve the user experience for blind users.

Michael Whapples

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 03/09/2010 11:10 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:
> Hello,
> Would it be possible for espeak to be made the default text to speech
> engine on the LiveCD?

Hi

This list is (AFAIK) for discussion and development of the tools used to 
build the Fedora live cds.

You might reach a more appropriate audience on 
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/spins - or perhaps 
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop

/Mads

[Michael Whapples]

So to be clear, is this list only concerned with the tools used to 
create a LiveCD and not with any other matters relating to a LiveCD (eg. 
what should be included on the LiveCD, the user experience when using 
the LiveCD, etc)? The description I found when I went to 
www.fedoraproject.org and followed the communicate link seemed to 
suggest otherwise to me.

Also the spins list you point to is not listed on the communicate page, 
so isn't obvious for someone to find.

Michael Whapples
On 03/09/2010 10:58 AM, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> On 03/09/2010 11:10 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:
> > Hello,
> > Would it be possible for espeak to be made the default text to speech
> > engine on the LiveCD?
>
> Hi
>
> This list is (AFAIK) for discussion and development of the tools used 
> to build the Fedora live cds.
>
> You might reach a more appropriate audience on 
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/spins - or perhaps 
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
>
> /Mads

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 12:26:04 +0000,
  Michael Whapples  wrote:
> So to be clear, is this list only concerned with the tools used to 
> create a LiveCD and not with any other matters relating to a LiveCD (eg. 
> what should be included on the LiveCD, the user experience when using 
> the LiveCD, etc)? The description I found when I went to 
> www.fedoraproject.org and followed the communicate link seemed to 
> suggest otherwise to me.

I think you really want to talk to the Desktop people about this issue.
The generic spins list will probably reach some of them, but most people
there aren't directly involved with what goes on the Desktop spin.