Other factor speaking personally with espeak is the largely poor speech
quality.
There is an effort to get copyright clearance for one of the dectalk
software speech sources.
I have no idea what the pi would provide speech wise, nor the cost factor.
Still, there are dectalk USB units available as well.
Lastly, Joseph got clearance for aSAP to be built into freedos. Once
installed, you can change the synthesizer output to a far wider variety of
options, including a generic voice intended for any speech not given a
specific driver.
At the end of the day, choice is the key element here for such a
distribution.
On Tue, 15 Oct 2024, Mike Coulombe via Freedos-user wrote:
Thanks! I'll have a look at this.
On 10/15/2024 6:36 AM, Mateusz Viste via Freedos-user wrote:
On 14/10/2024 17:37, Mike Coulombe via Freedos-user wrote:
> Hi, That distro sounds interesting, but I need to run free dos on
> different computers. If it had speech accessibility free dos would be
> very useful to blind people world wide considering all the free dos
> programs you can get and the amount of old computers many of can be had
> for free or next to nothing. Do you think it would be worth asking about
> this on the developer list or is that only for developers?
Running espeak as a TSR might be technically possible, but it would
certainly be bound to many limitations. I doubt anyone will want to invest
time into this, given that the result is likely to be of a limited
usefulness for any practical purposes.
Having a DOS distribution with a preinstalled screen reader that outputs
speech commands to the computer's serial port is a much more realistic
goal. I implemented this in SvarDOS today, so now the SvarDOS system is
available also as a version that "talks". It does require a Braille 'n
Speak synth to be connected, though:
http://svardos.org
I tested it on VirtualBox with an emulated BNS (emubns), and it seems to
work, assuming one knows how to use provox hotkeys to "explore" the
screen.
Hardware PCs require a hardware BNS, obviously, but a cheap solution could
be to run emubns on a Raspberry Pi connected to the PC with a
USB-to-serial cable.
Mateusz
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