[Accessibility] Portability of file descriptors and C streams

[Olaf Schmidt]

Hi!

On the accessibility@freedesktop.org list, we are currently discussing a 
common API for speech synthesis drivers, which we plan to support in 
kdeaccessibility. The drivers need to return an audio stream to the 
application or daemon, and we are at a point where we need input from 
multimedia developers to ensure that the API is fully portable.

The questions are:
1. When I asked Scott about the API, he suggested to use C streams to 
return the audio. However, the question appeared whether C streams can be 
used in other programming languages as well.
2. Milan therefore suggested to use file descriptors rather than C 
streams, but we are again not sure how portable they are.
3. The speech synthesis libraries return the audio data in different 
formats. Should we require to the drivers convert the audio data to a 
certain audio format (e.g. raw audio data) that is guaranteed to be 
supported by all multimedia frameworks, or can we reasonably expect all 
common audio formats to be supported by the frameworks?

It would be of great help to us if some multimedia experts could post a 
reply to the questions to accessibility@freedesktop.org, or maybe even 
join the list and help us to find good solution.

Olaf

-- 
KDE Accessibility Project
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