Speakup started out as my attempt to make GNU/Linux accessible to myself mostly, with a speech synthesizer. My fave synth is the DoubleTalk-PC so that's what I concentrated on. Once I had a very basic system running I decided to let a couple other people use it to see if it was worth while making available to the general public. The response from those folks was overwhelming and very gratifying. Of course, they all had their own ideas what they'd like to see speakup be able to do. Well, that's history as they say.
As with most projects, it started to snowball (that's what I get for living in Canada) and speakup grew and a number of other projects were identified as being needed for a truly accessible system. We have a long way to go before one could say that the blind community is on a "level playing field", but we're working toward it. My ultimate goal is to make the computer accessible with speech from power up to shut down.
Here is our current list of projects which we have underway or identified. There is a short paragraph on each and a link to a subsequent page giving the current status of that project.
Speakup, written by Kirk Reiser and Andy Berdan, is a screen review package for the Linux operating system. Speakup allows you to interact with applications and the os with audible feedback from the console using a synthetic speech device.
Trplayer, written by Matt Campbell, is a Text-Mode RealMedia Player for Linux/Unix which has a command-line interface. It can play RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, and all other media types supported by RealPlayer under Unix. TRPlayer was designed especially for blind Unix users, who don't yet have access to the graphical user interface. However, it is also useful to others; it is a good tool for background audio playback and for use on low-end hardware, such as Intel 486-based PC's.
Speak Freely, originally written by John Walker with modifications and enhancements by Jim Danley and Kirk Reiser. Speak Freely is a realtime text and audio IRC type program for the Linux, Unix and Windows platforms. You can visit the Speak Freely home by clicking here. Speak Freely allows one on one and round-robin style forums. Speak Freely is being enhanced by members of the Speakup community and is available from cvs.
TuxTalk, is a software-based synthesizer for the GNU/Linux operating system, originally based on rsynth. TuxTalk is scheduled to be the first software synth for speakup. TuxTalk has been designed to accept in stream commands based on the DoubleTalk command set. It currently supports rate, pitch change, punctuation levels and most important instant silencing of speech.
Awesome, the professional audio editing system for text based consoles is being developed to be an accessible text-based audio editor. because there are a number of other programs/packages which have potential to provide the same basic capability,This project is currently on hold pending exploration of other possible options.
EBTAFS, Electronic Braille Translation and Formatting system was originally written in the 80's by Kirk Reiser and ported to Linux by Darcy Bernard. It is a textbook style translator which provides automatic contents building, volume splitting and hand inclusion of nemith code or foreign languages.
html2ebtafs, an html preprocessor for EBTAFS would allow html tags to be translated to EBTAFS tags. This project is currently on hold pending the availability of EBTAFS.
socrates, is a text based OCR scanning and reading system. It will eventually support multiple OCR engines.
Listenup, the national libraries services of the government of the United States and the daisy consortium have been developing standards for a new digital talking book format. A number of organizations around the world are developing commercial devices and software packages for the windows platform. This project is to develop a GNU project for linux.
As you can see, there are many worthwhile projects going on in the speakup community. This is not an exhaustive list either. We should probably set up a project to write a java script interpreter for lynx. It doesn't appear that anyone else is doing it and it becomes more necessary everyday. The X-windows interface has not to date been addressed to the point of a commonly available working package although there are a number of efforts under way.
If you would like to help see some of these projects come to fruition, please check out our developer page and get involved. We always have more projects than dedicated helping hands.