[wellylug] accessible linux/opensource

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Mon Jul 2 13:26:53 NZST 2007


Rob Collins <robcollins55 at aim.com> writes:

> My mother's partner has recently lost most of his sight and he asked
> me if there any free open source alternatives to the very expensive
> IBM voice to text and text to spoken JAWS.  Already discovered the
> German "MARY" for dictation and the Sun Microsystems "Sphinx 4" for
> voice recognition.  Haven't tried out MARY yet as it is a 500MB
> download and although Sphinx 4 says it is voice recognition, I don't
> know what it does with the voice once it has been recognised (does it
> spit out english text file output like I am trying to achieve??)
>
> Anyone have any better suggestions or can help me with those mentioned
> above? He runs windows so something that will run on that is ideal but
> I could convince him of a Linux dual boot if that was the only way
> around it.

You probably want to investigate Emacsspeak; it has a very good
reputation for providing high quality voice output.  

I can only vouch for that annecdotally, however, and can't suggest
anything on configuration or the like.

> Also - does anyone know of any sight impairment accessibility add-ons
> for Linux (eg high contrast / large text etc)?  The Linux distro I'm
> most familiar with is Kubuntu.

My understanding is that the GNOME Accessibility Framework is rather
better developed at this stage of the game.

Regards,         
	Daniel
-- 
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
Phone: 0401 155 707        email: contact at digital-infrastructure.com.au
                 http://digital-infrastructure.com.au/




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