Re: Need input on accessible technology in the Russian Far East

At 20:36 4/05/2009, Avi Arditti wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>First, a belated congratulations on WCAG 2.0! (I left the working 
>group several years ago.) I recently met a blind man in the Russian 
>Far East who works with young people with disabilities. He was 
>trying to find ways to obtain computers for them and accessible 
>technology like screen readers. He only has an early version of 
>JAWS. Does anyone have any suggestions?

There are "RealSpeak Solo Direct Voices for Freedom Scientific 
Products" 
<http://www.freedomscientific.com/downloads/RealSpeak-Solo-Direct-Voices/RealSpeak-Solo-Direct-Downloads.asp>, 
but these require JAWS 10 or later.

On Linux, there seems to be an alternative: Orca + eSpeak. In the 
eSpeak documentation, Russian is currently only listed as a 
"provisional language" (because of problems with word stress and the 
disctinction between "hard" and "soft" consonants) 
<http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html>. I also found a 
message on the Orca list 
<http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2007-October/msg00331.html> 
where someone pointed to a page about Russian on festival (another 
open-source TTS): <http://festlang.berlios.de/docu/doku.php?id=russianru>.

I hope this helps, but you may be more successful on the WAI-IG list.

Best regards,

Christophe


>Many thanks,
>Avi Arditti
>

-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
---
"Better products and services through end-user empowerment" 
http://www.usem-net.eu/
---
Please don't invite me to LinkedIn, Facebook, Quechup or other 
"social networks". You may have agreed to their "privacy policy", but 
I haven't.

Received on Tuesday, 5 May 2009 09:01:37 UTC