[mary-users] Fwd: comments regarding accessibility

[Marc Schröder]

Tony,

thanks a lot for this feedback. Just a quick reply at the moment because
I am thoroughly overloaded with things to do before christmas.

I am grateful for your comments regarding the website, and indeed would
be happy to learn how to do this better. We use Plone (see
http://plone.org), so our accessibility problems are their accessibility
problems.

Adding expressivity is of course one of the challenging research topics
at the moment; no simple solutions exist yet. (but I suppose you have
seen the "EmoSpeak" demo on http://mary.dfki.de/online-demos/emospeak/).

If you want to get a rough (and slightly outdated) overview of the
system, there is the "architecture walkthrough" section of the website,
http://mary.dfki.de/documentation/module-architecture/. In more detail,
things are explained in a journal paper, a pre-print version of which
you can download from
http://mary.dfki.de/documentation/publications/schroeder_trouvain2003.pdf

Hope that gets you started, best wishes,
Marc

> From: "Tony  M Dart" <tony at seeingear.org>
> 
> Dear Dr Schroeder
> 
> I have just downloaded the MARY TTS system. he Java installer did not 
> work over the web, but downloading the lot, then installing, worked 
> perfectly immediately (System Windows 2000 Pro).
> 
> I saw your comment on the forum re accessibility. I am registered blind, 
> and use a large (20 inch) LCD screen at 800 x 600 dpi. I found your 
> website difficult to use, because the pages cannot be resized and each 
> line must be scrolled across to read. This, in fact, was one of the mjor 
> faults highlighted in a UN report on web-site inaccessibilty.
> 
> The product itself seems wonderful and maybe just what I need. I am 
> searching for a way to read books for the blind. My first step was to 
> set up a charity so that I could get a licence to get copyrighted 
> material legally. Then I set up a library of books - this is available 
> to any E U citizen who is visually impaired at www.seeingear.org. It is
> the only one such librrary in Europe, I think.
> 
> Now I have a corpus of material that I can add to I eed to find a way of 
> adding expression - either by offering modified texts for local 
> rendering or by emploting my own server and either streaming audio or 
> recording to CD and sending out. My belief is that I will need to 
> mark-up the texts in a number of ways - for structure (to assist i 
> navigation), for emotion (using EARL?) and maybe for voice or character. 
> Some fun times ahead!
> 
> My question - how can I find out more about how MARY works? What I need 
> is a working overview of the flow of control and which module produces 
> which outputs, rather than a detailed examination of the code. Where do 
> you recommend I look? I am a Perl programmer, so will have to learn Java.
> 
> My thanks, and my appreciation for what seems to be a very well thought
> out and solid package.
> 
> Regards
> Tony
> 
> 
> Tony Dart
> The Seeing Ear
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> 

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher
DFKI GmbH, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Here. Now. Real, first-person experience. Am I there to witness it?