[drupal-support] Making a Drupal website speak

[Bèr Kessels]

Kobus. 

I read myself into KDEs text-to speech stuff. And frankly I am very surprised 
by your route. 

FRom what I learned, modern T2S synthesisers deal with (valid) XHTML in a very 
good way. In other words: just use the proper XHTML, optionally with Speech 
CSS and let the clientside software handle your sites. 
I fail to see why you would want to present users with speech on server side, 
if they can very well deal with valid pages. 

Mohammed al-shar, welcome. I am very sure you will be a very valuable addition 
to the Drupal team. People who have good (first-hand) knowledge about speech 
and web, or braille terminals and XHTML can be of great help to improve 
Drupal even more. Welcome!

Ber

Op vrijdag 02 september 2005 09:03, schreef Kobus Myburgh:
> Ber,
>
> Sometimes it might be inappropriate just to speak whatever is on the page,
> because it will not be clear to follow - this much I have noticed. Look,
> for example, at a simple login page, what do you see?
>
> Username: [                    ]
> Password: [                    ]
>
> If you're going to hack t() to speak the text, it will read to you
> 'Username Password'. For blind users it might be useful to give a bit more
> instruction. Sighted users can use intuition to understand that the empty
> space means "username goes here" and "password goes here", but a blind user
> won't necessarily know that. The concept of "here" is not applicable to
> them. You can't say "click here" or "provide your e-mail address here".
>
> Immediate thought here would be:
>
> 1. Hack t(), as you suggested, by adding a parameter, say, sid, which
> refers to the content of #2. 2. Make a new table in the database with the
> exact text to speak on each system page, and use the sid parameter to
> retrieve that information from the database and speak it, if available.
>
> This would allow us to accomplish:
>
> 1. Keep the site's output to be regular for normal site visitors
> 2. Speak the normal t()'d text if the new database entry is not provided
> 3. Speak the alternative text if provided
>
> This would require one of two things:
>
> 1. Patching each and every core module, finding instances of t() and fixing
> them 2. Introduce a new function, say, s(), which will have one text string
> for each different page in Core.
>
> I assume #2 would be the easiest, but that s() would have to reside in a
> module, and be globally available, and tested for its presence with "if
> (module_exists(speech))..." or something like that?
>
> Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! I will get to work on that
> immediately... :-)
>
> Regards,
>
> Kobus
>
> >>> berdrupal at tiscali.be 9/2/2005 12:52:22 AM >>>
>
> Kobus,
>
> No I did not test it. I still need to figure out how to get my speech stuff
> working in KDE.
> I just came with the idea for a theme, because ALL content is ran trough
> themes. So you can easily do magic to any page in your theme. or example
> return an ogg instead of HTML.
>
> But, as said: all content all strings are ni the transatiopn databasze, so
> I think an easy way is to hack t(), so that it calls a speech function.
>
> Ber
>
> Op donderdag 01 september 2005 16:59, schreef Kobus Myburgh:
> > Ber,
> >
> > I will happily contribute the speech theme, however, most of my stuff is
> > not theme related. It is a module I wrote, and I need to speak the text
> > that is in Drupal core and modules, not content that I added to the site.
> > Did you test it out? Does it work on your side? Could you see my ideas?
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Kobus
> >
> > >>> berdrupal at tiscali.be 9/1/2005 4:48:56 PM >>>
> >
> > Most texts are ran trough t(), I guess you can use that? otherwise some
> > of the theme function might help you along. A speech theme would be very
> > cool.
> >
> > Op donderdag 01 september 2005 11:12, schreef Kobus Myburgh:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I have implemented a Drupal site with MSAgent for a project I need to
> > > do for my studies, as well as part of the ongoing project that I am
> > > working on at: http://drupal.org/node/22997.
> > >
> > > I have created a module that adds a few fields to every node that you
> > > create, namely:
> > >
> > > Spoken text (same as $node->body if not entered)
> > > Spoken title (same as $node->title if not entered)
> > > etc.
> > >
> > > While this works relatively well for published content, it will
> > > obviously not work for Drupal's system pages, e.g. the user login page
> > > or administration pages. Do I have to hard-code this into the Drupal
> > > modules, or is there a way I can extend all system modules to have
> > > customizable texts which can be spoken? If you need more access on the
> > > site to be able to create content and work on this project with me,
> > > please let me know.
> > >
> > > If you want a demo of the problem I am experiencing, please take a look
> > > at www.eagleeyes.co.za (currently only tested with IE6...) There will
> > > be a security message coming up, which you can decline. It is only to
> > > allow speech in the menu (will not be asked again if you put the site
> > > in your trusted zones in IE). The speech of the content will work
> > > regardless, providing you have a TTS Engine installed. This is usually
> > > installed to a degree with a standard Windows XP Pro install, so you
> > > shouldn't experience any trouble.
> > >
> > > If you look at the main page, you will see that the text is spoken to
> > > you, but if you click in the menu on the System -> Maintenance, you
> > > should be provided with an Access Denied message. When you press
> > > Control+Shift+J to activate speech, you will see what I mean.
> > >
> > > Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > > Kobus
> >
> > Regards,
> >  Bèr
> > --
> >  [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]
> > --
> > [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
> Regards,
>  Bèr
> --
>  [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
Regards,
 Bèr
-- 
 [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]