tuxmath-devel

[Tuxmath-devel] Accessibility

[William K. <nb...@so...>]

What do people think about accessibility issues?

I'm thinking that perhaps the game could speak the following things,
so that visually disabled people could play:

  1. speak the title menu options (eg, say "PRESS RETURN TO PLAY" out loud
     when the title appears, and then "PRESS RETURN TO [whatever]" when the
     arrow keys are used)

  2. speak the equations when they first appear on the screen (tweaking the
     timing of the game may be necessary to make it easier to play when it's
     talking)

  3. speak the numbers the player types (ZERO, ONE, TWO, etc.) as they
     type them.  Perhaps speak the total answer (eg, "TWELVE") when they
     hit RETURN.  (And maybe say "CLEAR" when they hit BACKSPACE)

  4. replace some of the sound effects (lasers, explosions, etc.) with
     spoken words describing what's going on ("CORRECT!" or "WRONG!" and
     "CITY 2 DESTROYED")  [ in that case, perhaps telling which column the
     comet is falling down when the equation is spoken would be useful, too ]


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?)


Commets?

Thanks!

-bill!

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>
Homepage: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/ >
PGP Info: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/contact/ >
Tux4Kids: < http://www.geekcomix.com/tux4kids/ >

Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Accessibility

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

On Thursday 30 August 2001  3:36pm, Samuel Hart wrote:
> 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),

Oh, one other thing I failed to mention here....

... If you pre-render all speech, it can take up lots of RAM. (It seems to 
essentially store it as uncompressed audio in memory, and calls it back up 
when you request a particular utterance).

-- 
Sam "Criswell" Hart <cri...@ge...> AIM, Yahoo!: <criswell4069>
Homepage: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/ >
PGP Info: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/contact/ >
Tux4Kids: < http://www.geekcomix.com/tux4kids/ >

Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Accessibility

[William K. <nb...@so...>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 03:36:38PM -0700, Samuel Hart wrote:
<snip> 
> Having to deal with Festival for TuxReader, I think I can answer all these 
> questions.

Well, sounds like it settles it! :)  Some WAVs should be simple enough.
Let's see:


numbers:

  zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
  ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, teen, twenty, thirty, forty,
  fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, hundred, thousand


operators:

  plus, minus, times, divided-by


misc:

  column [or something], city, shields, destroyed,
  game over, your score, wave, paused



I'm sure I'll think of more :)

-bill!