[Accessibility] Re: Updated requirements document

[Milan Zamazal]

Hello all,

I'd like to ask whether there is still interest among us in building the
common speech output system, in the sense of active participation?  I'm
not sure how to interpret the silence here last weeks after Willie
Walker and I have rewritten the requirements document.  Possible
interpretations are:

a. The issue is no longer interesting.  (Unlikely.)

b. The issue appeared to be too difficult to solve.  (Are separate
   incompatible solutions easier?)

c. Everyone expects that someone else steps in and does the work.
   (Which is a typical deadlock situation, so guess what happens in such
   a case...)

d. People forgot to subscribe here.  (But I can see 23 subscribers here,
   including most people from the former private conversation.)

e. The rewritten requirements document is too difficult to read.  (Why
   not to ask for clarification to help it improve then?)

f. There are great ideas among us, but we haven't managed to present
   them here yet and to contribute to the requirements document so that
   it could be finished.  (Please speak up if this is the case!)

g. All people here think everything has already been solved.

More about g. :-) I think we succeeded to agree on the basic requirement
set.  But I can see two major obstacles preventing further work on the
document:

- It is still unclear to me, whether SSML as defined by the current W3C
  standard can serve as a good input format able to express the
  requirements on the synthesis.

- I have no good idea about the way the audio output should be sent from
  the synthesizer if we ever want to use index marks.

Well?  What do you think about that all? ;-)

Regards,

Milan Zamazal

-- 
The rush to reproduce Microsofts window environment seems to overshadow the
design process of determining what a window environment should be, and what its
ultimate users will want.                  -- Barry Fishman in gnu.misc.discuss