Laura,
Thank you so much for going through and explaining that information!! Personally, I am not a script writer . . . only a script borrower. This is very helpful.
My goal would be to develop a system whereby teachers can plug in worksheets and easily convert them to speakable online text.
Hmmmm . . . .
Marilyn
On 27.09.2012 09:33am, LM wrote:
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 8:16 AM, <marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:This is the best embedded text-to-speech feature I have seen . . . https://sample.stemscopes.com/scopes/203 This is a STEMscopes sample page. The voice quality is so good I thought it was audio at first. I believe it was written by their webmaster consultant dude. He also writes phone apps. Not open source though.I didn't try logging in, but just looking at the login page (which I was redirected to), my guess is the support is probably done mainly in _javascript_ and more specificly with the jQuery library. If you do view source on the login page, you see references to /_javascript_s/jwplayer.js, /_javascript_s/jwplayer.js, etc. If you take the link and repoint it to the _javascript_ files, for instance https://sample.stemscopes.com/_javascript_s/jwplayer.js , you can indeed view the source code. So while this may not be an Open Source project (it may be copyrighted), if it's in _javascript_, the code is typically accessible. I am personally not a big fan of jQuery. (I prefer standard _javascript_ language syntax to its coding style and I prefer writing things myself.) However, a lot of people use jQuery because it provides commonly needed functions and it's tested on a wide variety of platforms. There are quite a lot of plugins for jQuery to handle various tasks such as multimedia ( http://archive.plugins.jquery.com/ ). Here are a couple of plugins that try to handle multimedia in a cross-browser friendly way: http://jquery.malsup.com/media/ http://www.jplayer.org/ My first guess would be that any _javascript_ code to playback text to speech would still need a text to speech converter program (like espeak, festival, flite, etc.) on the server to generate the audio to play back. Doing some search, looks like that isn't necessarily always the case: http://syntensity.com/static/espeak.html https://github.com/mattytemple/speak-js#readme Someone's actually converted the C/C++ code to bitcode using LLVM ( https://github.com/kripken/emscripten ) and then the bitcode can be run directly using _javascript_ on the client side. So, a program like espeak can be converted from C/C++ to _javascript_. Looking at some of the Drupal based solutions, they look fairly similar. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeTTS , FreeTTS is using flite rewritten in Java. If it's running client side, it would require downloading Java and a browser that could handle Java applets. If it's running server side, then any text to speech converter could do the same job. Here's another Drupal module that appears to use espeak: http://drupal.org/project/1215214/git-instructions Not sure exactly what technique https://sample.stemscopes.com/scopes/203 is using, but if you view the source of the page, you should be able to come up with some good clues as to what libraries it's using. It does look like Open Source libraries are available to do these types of tasks. The big problem with these types of solutions is that they require a browser that can handle client side code (in the cases mentioned, _javascript_ or Java applets). Some Open Source browsers don't support it and some users turn _javascript_ off as it can be an added security risk. Java's less likely to be available on a system than _javascript_ is and licensing may be an issue for Open Source users going forward. (Same could go for alternatives like Silverlight or Flash.) The Free Software Foundation is trying to get _javascript_ licensed ( http://www.fsf.org/news/announcing-js-labels ) and wants browsers that won't run _javascript_ unless it's properly licensed. (Personally, I think that's going to be a nuisance for _javascript_ code developers and most sites probably won't bother with it.) Even if _javascript_ is supported, audio support isn't guaranteed in a browser either. I think the most accessible method is typically the simplest method. Provide a way to click a link that downloads an audio representation of the information. If it's too much to record each web page, then the process could probably be automated server side using a text-to-speech converter. If the download links are created server side, they'll be available on all browsers. If you absolutely have to have the information played back in a browsers, one could use _javascript_ and/or HTML 5 audio tags (and hopefully set it to play back only on user request). However, it's still always nice to provide a link to download multimedia in case some user has a browser that doesn't support that functionality. Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp ### To unsubscribe from the schoolforge-discuss mailing list: Send an e-mail message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with no subject and a body of "unsubscribe schoolforge-discuss"