Make X apps speak text too! fokSyf Eye R (Puppy and Ubuntu)

Stuff that has yet to be sorted into a category.
Message
Author
mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

sc spreadsheet addition, other dotpets modified to suit

#21 Post by mcewanw »

Sorry for such a quick change/modification/addition to the ScreenReaderEnviro, but I came across a commandline spreadsheet called sc which uses vi-like key-bindings.

Had a bit trouble compiling it (needed to modify xmalloc.c malloc type declaration to void), but that got it compiled.

I can't say sc works with yasr/espeak to my satisfaction, so your mileage will vary, and it probably has a bit of a learning curve (comes with a tutorial though). I admittedly pressed alt-enter to temporarily disable yasr whilst studying sc's tutorial and help instructions in this instance.

EDIT: sc works not too bad afterall, even with yasr. As a test I summed a column of three numbers as follows:

1. I moved to A0 (can use vi controls hjkl or the cursor keys) and pressed 'e' to edit the cell contents.
2. I entered the value 5
3. I similary put the values 7 and 4 in cells A1 and A2 respectively.
4. In cell A3 I entered the formula: @sum(A0:A2)
and the spreadsheet correctly displayed the total = 16.

Anyway, it may prove useful and I've consequently modified/upgraded version numbers of some of the other related dotpets. You thus need to re-download and install:

sreREADMEmain.txt
menusp-0.8.2.pet
sreHELPSYSTEM-0.8.2.pet
sc-7.16-i486.pet

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

The SRE is now available as a single 4 MByte dotpet

#22 Post by mcewanw »

The Screen Reader Environment, suitable for adding to many Puppy Linux distributions, is now available in the form of a single dotpet whose total size is less than 4 MBytes.

It contains the latest cvs version of edbrowse, which is now pdf (text) capable.

For details see top post of this thread at:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 879#172879
Last edited by mcewanw on Sun 02 Mar 2008, 14:44, edited 1 time in total.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

minor documentation change now SREcore-0.9.2

#23 Post by mcewanw »

Sorry, I had forgotten to add the edbrowse usersguide to the menu, so have re-uploaded. Now SREcore version 0.9.2
Apart from a couple of other minor documentation fixes it is the same code as 0.9.0.

Don't worry about PETget manager suggesting there are around four dependencies missing. It all sorts itself out (they aren't missing...)

Thanks to Eric (Caneri) you can find the SRE dotpet at:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/ScreenReaderEnviro/

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

catppt also in the new ALLinOne SRWcore dotpet

#24 Post by mcewanw »

I should also have mentioned somewhere that as well as catdoc and xls2csv, catppt for extracting data from MS-Powerpoints is also in the new all-in-one SRE filesystem. Could be occasionally handy.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 879#172879

Now going to download the latest Dingo alpha so that I can ensure compatibility, but I expect no problem there.

-----------------------

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

Please reinstall SREcore: major error rectified

#25 Post by mcewanw »

Unfortunately, there was a major error in the SREcore dotpet uploaded yesterday, that for once was no fault of my own!

However, I have now rectified the error and uploaded the new fixed version, SREcore-0.9.3.pet, to its usual repository:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/ScreenReaderEnviro/

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

Documentation and espeak issues

#26 Post by mcewanw »

The documentation provided in this 'first' release is hopefully better than nothing, but not much more than that.

Documentation in itself is a huge job, and even the authors of the provided applications, who have worked on their documentation for years, struggle to provide it in an easy to assimilate form.

As with anything else, there are many conflicting ideas about what style and format of documentation is best.

On Puppy Linux, for install size considerations, it is common practice to strip out as much installed documentation as possible, and to rely on the applications' online documentation.

However, sometimes it is nice to have some local docs available.

I am concerned to keep the SREcore dotpet down in size, so I am now going to create a separate dotpet, SREcoredocs, for documentation alone, so that the user can choose to install it or not. I can however only supply the documentation I have had time to write, or that which the various applications' authors have provided. It is thus up to the individual user to tailor any provided documentation for their own needs. Of course, if users post their own more polished help file efforts, I will select from these for possible inclusion in my to-be-provided SREcoredocs dotpet. Html forms of documentation would be especially nice since they allow easy navigation.

Note well that a major task in writing such documentation is to make it as espeak friendly as possible. For example, the filename of the program I often refer to as "k rec speakk" is really "krecspk" but the latter spelling is very poorly enunciated by e speak. Like wise email is better written in separate syllables as "e mail" and vi as v i. You need to experiment to find the best ways for other symbols and words.

The skeleton menusp program, which I provide, is also due for some simple restructuring related to documentation handling. However, menusp, is only intended as a possible starter template and users are encourage to write their own frontend UI's for their own purposes.

A simple menu, from another project, which illustrates the kind of thing required can be seen at:

http://www.ipsis.hr/gls/about.html
[just over half way down that page]

However, in the case of the S R E there is more than one text editor and browser to be linked to from the menu, so the simple naming scheme of the above link (first referred to by Lobster as far as I know) is probably not quite appropriate.
Last edited by mcewanw on Tue 04 Mar 2008, 13:16, edited 6 times in total.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

Using the S R E alongside a G U I browser

#27 Post by mcewanw »

Note that the Screen Reader Environment is not intended to be useful solely for blind users. The visually impaired generally and sighted users as well may find it useful. Indeed I often run edbrowse, as a way of reading out webpage text, but maybe quickly visit the same webpage in Seamonkey at the same time, just to have any images visible.

That is, a G U I browser can conveniently provide graphics images, whilst the S R E can read out the page. This is a simpler alternative to the use of any bloated screen-scraper type of solution to transform the text content of a complex G U I browser such as Seamonkey.

Indeed, the above process can easily be automated in a frontend script.
-------------------
You can also highlight any GUI text anywhere and copy it into the cut/paste buffer and execute commands like:

xcut -p | espeak

or, paste the text into v i and press alt-w to get yasr to read it.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

next version of menusp

#28 Post by mcewanw »

The next version of my very basic, skeleton menusp program, that I am in the process of testing, will take the following U I form:

Code: Select all

Press: backspace to momentarily stop audio messages

e for Edbrowse web browser and email
k for K rec-speakk for audio recording/playback
l for Lynx web browser
s for Spreadsheet
v for V I text editor
b for Bash shell prompt
e u for Edbrowse brief usage
k u for K rec-speakk brief usage
l u for Lynx brief usage
s u for Spreadsheet brief usage
v u for V I brief usage
x for Xtra applications
c for Configure the S R E
h for Help guides and tutorials
q for Quit

Make your choice

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

SREcore-0.9.4.pet released. Major menusp developments.

#29 Post by mcewanw »

Some rapid development in progress today on the Screen Reader Environment provided menu/help system program script, menusp.

SREcore-0.9.4.pet is accordingly newly packaged and ready for download. Everything compiled on Puppy 2.17.1 and also tested on 3.01 and 2.14R.

Download as usual from Caneri's site:
http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/ScreenReaderEnviro/

The whole filesystem remains embedded in the one dotpet of size less than 4 MBytes. After installing, start the SRE by entering the following two commands, one after the other:

Code: Select all

initsp
menusp
Much work still needs to be done on the help system files to make them e speak friendly. Having them re written into html form would also be excellent. In the meantime, the available rough documentation remains within SREcore.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

Feel free to modify the provided menu for your own needs

#30 Post by mcewanw »

I've hopefully written the provided menusp in a way that is easy for anyone to modify, should they so wish. I've intentionally written the menu as a relatively simple and hopefully reasonably structured shell script at this stage, in order to make it more accessible to others who might want to customise it. For example, the key letters used to select categories can be changed to anything that suits.

I've also included what I hope is a complex/flexible enough hierarchical structure to the menu itself (for example, key h for help calls up another menu), to allow for easy adaptation and expansion. The same hierarchical structure can be duplicated elsewhere in the menu to expand it, if you wish, simply by cutting and pasting relevant sections of code appropriately and assigning suitable select keys. A more sophisticated programming technique could have been used, but for now I wanted to keep it in a language many people know.

If any particular user or group of users would like a custom arrangement, but do not know shell scripting, let me know and I'll see if I can help.

Whatever menu arrangement you do use, let me know what works for you. At this stage I'm perfectly happy to include several such menus in the dotpet. A menu such as the provided one takes up very little space, so choice in this case is a good thing I think. Indeed, the next menu may include a choice of "skins". Clearly, a more complex programming technique might be used in the future.

What I'd really like now is better, "blind friendly/ e speak friendly", documentation to replace what is provided currently. Though I've provided a fair amount of documentation from various sources, most of it is admittedly far from adequate, at this stage, in terms of usability and intelligibility when used with e speak.

Unfortunately, I don't have time at present to add much more documentation or to polish up the existing material. Furthermore, I know I'm not the best person to do that job; I'm not blind, and what I think works or sounds adequate may not actually be as good as I think it is. Indeed, no matter my good intentions, I can't trust myself to not occasionally look at the screen! So, I'm hoping some kind volunteers/testers, particularly those from within the blind/visually impaired community, will help in that all important but very complex documentation production and re writing process.

There are inevitably limitations with a package like this, which employs diverse applications, most of which were not written with screen reading in mind, like alone to work compatibly with each other. In that sense, this approach cannot fairly be compared to, for example, emacspeak, which employs the power of one huge but consistent application to do pretty much everything. Nevertheless, I hope that the SRE provides a lot of usable functionality in what is a very small and easily installed package.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

The speech synthesiser

#31 Post by mcewanw »

Of course, the output can only be as good as the available speech synthesiser. Unfortunately, e speak is all I have to work with. Better than nothing, and a limitation that a paid for quality synthsiser would fix... In practice, the package shouldn't be too difficult to modify should a better speech synthesiser become available. But I don't have one to try!

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

yasr usage help

#32 Post by mcewanw »

Sleepy though I currently am,
I just suddenly realised that I forgot to include a usage
help for yasr itself. A bit of an oversight that I will fix tomorrow.
I'll upload a new dotpet 0.9.5 with that on the menu then.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

The foksyf Eye R, Screen Environment Reader (was the SRE)

#33 Post by mcewanw »

The foksyf Eye R, Screen Environment Reader (was the SRE)
new version 0.9.5 package is now available for download; currently still in the repository folder named:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/ScreenReaderEnviro/

at Caneri's site.

See top of present thread for some details. i e .:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 879#172879

Unfortunately, the name alteration has involved some relatively minor cut and paste documentation alterations,
some documentation file renaming, as well as some menu coding alterations.
The new dotpet menusp reflects these additions. This version has a GPLv3 license only. I'm pretty certain that all the included apps in the package are GPL of one sort or another, but it would be good if you'd check on their websites for yourself, in case I blunder in that regard!
I'm currently also developing a version compatible for the ubuntu family,
but that is taking second place in my priorities at present.

Eventually I'll put the project's documentation in some revision control system to make it easier to handle, but I'm not ready to do that at the moment. In the meantime, if you have any documentation samples of your own (or menusp customisations) that you would like to be considered for inclusion just post them in.

For the moment I'm keeping a simple notebook (along with Notecase) for noting words and phrases that I need to improve or fix to make them spoken more clearly by the speech synthesiser. It would thus be good if you could post a file with any such words/phrases etc that you notice in your testing, for adding to my own notes and todo list. You can either post such an erratum here or to:

wiakapps *AT* wiak *dot* org

The overall erratum is undoubtedly large, so I may take a while implementing all the necessary changes.
Last edited by mcewanw on Fri 07 Mar 2008, 01:13, edited 1 time in total.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

configuring yasr speech 'reader' on the fly

#34 Post by mcewanw »

I'm working on configuration issues at the moment, prior to adding some config options to menusp etc. In the meantime you may find the following info useful, if you haven't already discovered it yourself. Note that these are "aural" only configurations, for a blind user - you don't see anything happening on the screen; you have to listen to what is going on:

When yasr the speech reader is enabled you can change most of its options on the fly, including whether to echo typed text or not. Here is a short list of options I know about so far:

1. With yasr enabled, to enter the yasr options menu you should enter the key combination:

ctrl alt o

If you then press letter k it will aurally tell you the current key echo state.

Pressing the space bar cycles you through the possibilities: off, keys, word

Once you have the one you want, you should press the escape key. Yasr then announces it is leaving the options menu.

Finally, you need to save your configuration change by pressing ctrl alt s

To test the effect of what you just did, I recommend that you try typing something, for example in v i, so that you can hear what difference the new option makes. For example, if you have set key echo to "word", then everytime you have finished typing a word, the word will be echoed. If you have set key option to "keys" every key press will be echoed.

2. After pressing ctrl alt o for the option menu:

If you then press letter u it will tell you the current effect of pressing the up and down cursor arrow keys.

Pressing the space bar cycles you through the possibilities: speak line, speak character, or speak word

Once you reach the one you want it to be, press escape key to leave the options menu and save your new configuration with ctrl alt s as you did before.

3. Similarly after ctrl alt o, pressing key c allows you to alter the assignment for "cursor tracking". Again you use the space bar to cycle through the possibilities, and then press escape key and ctrl alt s to save whatever you have selected. Once again you can test the effect in v i; best to type a few lines of text first and then try moving around.

4. One special case after a ctrl alt o, is key s. This has multiple options assigned to it. Each time you press s, a different option starting with the letter s is announced. The options cycled through are:

synthesiser option, synthesiser port, shell, and, split caps.

Most of these are pretty technical and you won't want to alter them.
[Edit] Maybe you do! synthsiser option is very useful, see next post.

Again, the space bar is used to assign new preset values to whichever one you are interested in. Then you press escape and ctrl alt s to save as before.

Finally, there is another way of doing it...

Once you press ctrl alt o to change an option, you can use the up and down cursor keys to cycle through all the possible options. You can change any option thus reached by using the space bar, as before, or by using the cursor left and right arrow keys to assign a new value.

It may all sound a bit complicated, but I found either method easy once I'd tried it a couple of times and got the idea.

I'm still working on what options can be changed altogether, so that is all I know about configuring yasr at this time.

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

configuring e speak via yasr: synthsiser option

#35 Post by mcewanw »

Changing the speech itself:

After ctrl alt o to select yasr options,

And pressing s until you hear "synthesiser option"

Tap the right cursor key once to hear the word "rate"
space bar (or a further tap on the right cursor key) lets you then alter
that rate (i.e. the speed of e speak speaking). If you change you mind
about entering a new value, press escape key to abort, and then continue
selecting options if you wish by pressing s (or the up/down cursor key).

Alternatively, one you first hear the word "rate", continually tapping
down cursor key will take you through all of the synthesiser options:
rate, pitch, volume, language, output module (for cases where you have an
alternative speech synthesiser to e speak), punctuation (whatever
punctuation you want spoken)

Then press escape key to leave the options and ctrl alt s to save as before.

djringjr
Posts: 157
Joined: Sun 14 Jan 2007, 21:08

#36 Post by djringjr »

I'm just reposting part of mcewanw's post above so that the links work.
The foksyf Eye R, Screen Environment Reader (was the SRE)
new version 0.9.5 package is now available for download; currently still in the repository folder named:
http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/ScreenReaderEnviro/ at Caneri's site.

See top of present thread for some details. i e .:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 879#172879

Thanks

David

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

wiak.org's fokSyf Eye R development site

#37 Post by mcewanw »

wiak.org's fokSyf Eye R development site

http://foksyfeyer.wiak.org/

which points to the current host site:

http://foksyfeyer.freehostia.com/

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

fokSyf Eye R, version 0.9.6 now ready

#38 Post by mcewanw »

The new 0.9.6 includes the latest compilations of espeak and speech-dispatcher. The bug with "less than signs" not being read out in edbrowse, etc, has now been fixed.

Expanded menusp included and a new setup script, fokssetup, which should be run immediately after the dotpet has been installed. NOTE: it is important that you uninstall any previous version before installing this new one.

Best to read the provided installREADME.txt carefully and not miss out any steps.

Caneri
Posts: 1513
Joined: Tue 04 Sep 2007, 13:23
Location: Canada

#39 Post by Caneri »

Hi mcewanw,

I did a quick test of your new setup.

It seems to work well...I cheat because I am sighted but following your install guide and the menusp it's quite easy to start using your .pet for fokSyf Eye R.

Somehow I crashed fokSyf Eye R..probably because I was typing in commands and made mistakes so the program became confused..if that is possible (maybe the wrong way to say that).

Anyway..this is quite an accomplishment..WELL DONE.

Best,
Eric
[color=darkred][i]Be not afraid to grow slowly, only be afraid of standing still.[/i]
Chinese Proverb[/color]

mcewanw
Posts: 3169
Joined: Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:48
Contact:

fokSyf Eye R, Screen Environment Reader

#40 Post by mcewanw »

fokSyf Eye R, Screen Environment Reader

new version 0.9.7 now released

See top post of this thread for details:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26184

initsp now renamed to: ifoksy
menusp now renamed to: foksy
The foksy menu has undergone some major restructuring and some tidying up.
foksy now has a few simple options,
enter: foksy -? or foksy --help for brief usage details.

I'll be creating an addon for extra fokSyf Eye R compatible applications soon once I've compiled and tested some. The current "eXtra" menu item is currently just a skeleton. However, a somewhat pre-configured version of Brltty, as promised some time back, will be included in the CORE dotpet.

Post Reply