[drupal-support] Making a Drupal website speak

Fri Sep 2 13:09:10 UTC 2005

Ber,

The reason why I am going this route is because:

1. Many people can't afford commercial screen readers.
2. Most of the screenreaders in the open-source/freeware market that I've evaluated simply sucks, to say the least.
3. As I said - sometimes you don't want to speak the exact text than what you print on the page, as per my login example below.
4. Most of the times, a person who has never used a computer for more than a simple word processing task before (like my blind girlfriend), understanding the open-source movement will be a daunting ask. She doesn't even understand Windows, how will she understand that? It must "just work" when she opens her browser. No questions asked, no nothing.
5. I want the site to work for ANYONE, not just those with screen readers. This site must talk for someone even without a screen reader.

Now, maybe my route is still not optimal, and introduces problems that would otherwise not be present, but considering my circumstances and my requirements, it would defeat the purpose to let the client's T2S handle this.

The question now is - when I get this to work (oh, and I will...) should I contribute it to Drupal, if it is not optimal?

Regards,

Kobus

>>> berdrupal at tiscali.be 9/2/2005 2:40 PM >>>
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
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 [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]
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