UTF-8 and Speakup

UTF-8 and Speakup

[Zachary Kline]

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Hi,
I've been curious for a while now about Unicode, UTF-8, and related
issues.  I imagine that whether or not Speakup works with Unicode
characters would depend in large part on the speech synthesizer used.
Add to that, of course, the fact that seeing a character on screen and
pronouncing it are two different things.  So, all told, I'm just curious
about this topic in general: what works and what doesn't?  I'm not going
to be doing anything foreign language related myself, but do like the
idea of being able to put in an accented letter now and again.
Best,
Zack.

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Re: UTF-8 and Speakup

[Janina Sajka]

Hi,

I'm glad you brought this up. I've been wrestling with a Speakup related
UTF8 issue for some time. Fortunately, there has been progress.

1.)	The old situation where screen review would suddenly only see
null chars appears resolved. I have been defaulting to LANG=en_US.UTF-8
on my Fedora 9 laptop without problems.


2.)	However, I can still trigger that problem with null chars by
suspending and then resuming. Since that pretty much destroys the
usability of Speakup for me, I spent my entire week at the recent Linux
Foundation Collaboration Summit working exclusively with Orca which
suspended and resumed without incident.

To the other question of mixed language pronunciation--I've not noted
English Speakup being able to correctly pronounce foreign language
chars.  Would be nice, and may be possible, I suppose.

In rich text environments (like web or OpenOffice), however, we should
expect our synthesizer synthesizers to switch pronunciation on the fly,
if content is correctly coded with <lang=> tags. This may require
loading more than one language, but that could be indicated by
configurations. I believe there has been movement in this direction, but
I expect it's mostly evident where rich text is properly parsed, which
would mainly mean Orca.

Janina

Zachary Kline writes:
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> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Hi,
> I've been curious for a while now about Unicode, UTF-8, and related
> issues.  I imagine that whether or not Speakup works with Unicode
> characters would depend in large part on the speech synthesizer used.
> Add to that, of course, the fact that seeing a character on screen and
> pronouncing it are two different things.  So, all told, I'm just curious
> about this topic in general: what works and what doesn't?  I'm not going
> to be doing anything foreign language related myself, but do like the
> idea of being able to put in an accented letter now and again.
> Best,
> Zack.