[Accessibility] Re: [Access-activists] Call to Arms

[Milan Zamazal]

>>>>> "TVR" == T V Raman <address@hidden> writes:

    TVR> Interestingly enough, I pretty much received the same response
    TVR> from the FSF to the emacspeak work in 1995 -- because
    TVR> "Emacspeak used a commercial text-to-speeh engine on Linux" --
    TVR> at the time, there were no free engines available, and though
    TVR> today hat situation has changed some with the availability of
    TVR> the espeak engine, most blind users would abandon linux if
    TVR> espeak were their only choice. 

Factual note: eSpeak is not the only choice, there were also Festival
and other less important free synthesizers around providing quite
different speech quality several years before eSpeak has appeared.  Most
free speech output tools (including at least one Emacs speech interface)
work with both Festival and eSpeak.  So actually there has been no fatal
lack of free speaking tools in this regard on GNU/Linux for several
years and one would abandon the system because of voice quality only if
he values some differences in voice quality more than his freedom.