Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Accessibility

[Samuel H. <cri...@ge...>]

On Thursday 30 August 2001  2:33pm, William Kendrick wrote:
> What do people think about accessibility issues?
<snip>
> How portable is festival between OSes?  How integratable to SDL is it?
> (Should it jump in as a full replacement for SDL_mixer; eg, no SFX music
> and just speech?  Or can they live happily together?  Or should we just
> have WAV files of people saying numbers and words?)

Having to deal with Festival for TuxReader, I think I can answer all these 
questions.

1) Festival isn't very portable. The UNIX version runs on /most/ Unixes (but 
not all). Apparently someone has managed to make it compile under Win32, but 
its functionality is limitted. THere are no MacOS, BeOS, or any other ports I 
know of.

2) Festival is a major CPU hog.

3) Festival is either very slow, or very hard to use. If you use it the 
simple way (in the client/server model) Festival will be very slow to respond 
to any request. If you use it in the API model, you can speed things up a bit 
(especially if you pre-render all speech), however compilation becomes a 
nightmare (Festival API applications require MASSIVE ammounts of libraries.)

4) Festival ONLY works with OSS. So, it takes over the sound system under 
Linux (and wouldn't work with SDL_mixer).

5) In the client/server model, the client fires requests away, but rec's 
nothing that tells it when Festival has spoken, or if it even will.

Thus, I personally feel Festival isn't right for most games (I have decided 
against using it in Tux Typing). If you used it in TuxMath, in addition to 
slowing down the game tremendously, all speech would be delayed so much as to 
make it useless in the game.

(Now, I am still using it in TuxReader, but TuxReader is not much of a 
"reflex" game, so we can deal with these shortcomings. Plus, it is a pretty 
good excersize to try and use it at least once ;-)

-- 
Sam "Criswell" Hart <cri...@ge...> AIM, Yahoo!: <criswell4069>
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