IntroductionTable of Contents
Jovie is a subsystem within KDE for producing Text-to-Speech (TTS). It provides a common API for KDE programmers to give TTS capabilities to their applications. It provides some nice capabilities for end users as well.
User features:
Speak contents of a text file.
Speak KDE notification events (KNotify).
Speak all or part of the text of a web page in Konqueror.
Speak all or part of the text in Kate text editor, including instances where Kate is embedded in another KDE application.
Speech is spoken via speech-dispatcher, so any speech-dispatcher backend can be used (espeak, festival, etc.)
User-configurable filters for substituting misspoken words, choosing speech synthesizers, and transforming XHMTL/XML documents.
Programmer features:
Priority system for screen reader outputs, warnings and messages, while still playing regular texts.
Permit generation of speech from the command line (or via shell scripts) using the qdbus utility.
Provide a lightweight and easily usable interface for applications to generate speech output.
Applications need not be concerned about contention over the speech device.
FUTURE: Provide support for speech markup languages, such as VoiceXML, Sable, Java™ Speech Markup Language (JSML), and Speech Markup Meta-language (SMML).
FUTURE: Provide limited support for embedded speech markers.
Asynchronous to prevent system blocking.
Jovie actually consists of several programs:
- jovie
the KDE Text-to-Speech Daemon, which is an application that provides TTS services to applications via D-Bus. It also sits in the system tray.
- libkhtmlkttsdplugin
A plugin for the Konqueror web browser that permits you to speak all or a portion of the text on a web page.
- ktexteditor_kttsd
A plugin for the Kate text editor that permits you to speak all or a portion of a text file.
In addition to the KDE Bugzilla database ( http://bugs.kde.org/ ), discussions for Jovie currently take place in the kde-accessibility mailing list. Subscribe at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility. Developers also hang out in IRC (irc.kde.org, channel #kde-accessibility).