Willie Walker's Weblog

The eSpeak speech synthesizer is a very useful tool for providing free speech synthesis for a variety of languages. Gilles Casse did some great work in the past writing a gnome-speech driver for eSpeak, which led to a whole bunch of wonderful things for Orca. Unfortunately, some of the technology used didn't work so well on Solaris Express and I've been trying for quite some time to remedy the situation -- it's been over a year of on-and-off hacking (mostly off). Much of the problem is just the horrendous state that audio support is in across all platforms.

At last year's GUADEC, I asked around about emerging audio solutions and what work people might be doing in this space. One of the strong contenders is PulseAudio, and it happened that Lennart Poettering was there to give a talk. I attended the talk and was intrigued and began asking around about PulseAudio support for eSpeak. Later in the year, Gilles worked on PulseAudio support for eSpeak, and I finally spent the time yesterday and today putting things together on my Solaris Express Community Edition b79 x86 box. With a little hacking (see my notes), I was able to get it working with Orca on Solaris Express.

Big deal, you say? Well it is for me. This helps Open Solaris provide free accessibility support for people with visual impairments for a large number of locales. In addition, the very small footprint of eSpeak also helps get us one step closer to an accessible install for Solaris Express. I'm psyched about that. I've already played around with using Orca to access a demo version of Project: Caiman installer and have sent the development team feedback. If I get time, I will look more at the Slim Install work, especially the Distribution Constructor. It's probably an unrealistic dream, but I'd love to show off an accessible install at this year's CSUN. That would be totally cool.

As usual -- thanks everyone who helped! Open source and positive community collaboration puts a smile on my face.