voice prompts recording Re: ui customisation for accessibility

[Robert Michel]

Salve Matthew!

On Fri, 08 Dec 2006, Matthew Wood wrote:
> > Are you impaired yourself? Or does you work with impaired people?  
> > Will you like to join OpenMoko development?
> 
> Yes, I am visually impaired myself, and I am a developer. And right  
> now I need a new phone, and one that I can use ;-) So, yes, I'm very  
> interested in developing for OpenMoko!

Your interest in developing for/with OpenMoko is great ;)

> But you are right that there are also opportunities for 'cool'  
> accessibility: off the top of my head i can imagine that the 'speed  
> reading' technique of displaying individual letters sequentially  
> might give a very accessible (and fast!) way to read smss. It'd be  
> great to implement this and see how it flies!
:)

A friend of mine had the wish that just shaking the phone would 
say the current time to his bluetooth headset - well without a
sensor and bluetooth this will be an idea for v2 - but just another
idea how a phone could become more usable. 

IMHO audio output has a high potential and because text to speach
is not so clear, not so understandable and a little monoton/boring,
prerecorded voices for free use "left, right, one, two...) like
for asterisk would be interesting:
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk+sound+files+international  

For doing that, some "official" sets of text would be helpful,
so that integration of different languagtes or just choosing a
different speaker would become more easyer.

To have homogenous voice recordings, it would help to to avoid 
recording one set on different days. Also the technical equipment,
acustical quality of the recording room (studio) and (semi)proffessional
recording assistance would help that the effort of doing a recording
of a big set would worth it and would be usable for a long time.

I have worked for a radiostation and sometimes I meet people where I 
think "wow this person has a great, clear voice". For the beginning
a semi-good recording is better then nothing - and I guess it would 
take a year that we have a good list of words for small, medium and
a big set of voice-outputs.
But on the long term, I'm interested to support other people to 
record on a high quality level.

So what would be a good starting point to have create a wordlist
for "voice prompts" recordings? Which licence to use? GPL?


Some more questions:
Beside this idea, did you already have used free text2speach tools
like mbrola?

I still worry about the touchscreen and text imput. Do you have ideas
how to use it?

And OpenMoko/Neo1973 will be more than a GSM-phone, do you have ideas
how to use other features like calender/agenda with an ui optimized
for visually impaired people?
Wap/Web browser?

Do you have ideas how AGPS could be used to makes your life more comfortable?
E.g. busstation/trainstation? Cooperation with other v.i. people and
exchange information linked to local coordiantes...

more?


Greetings,
rob