Emacspeak and Handhelds

["Bryan Smart" <brsmart@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some of you may be familiar with the current situation of speech access to
PDAs.  Neither the PalmOS or Windows CE OSes are currently able to provide
enough functionality to host a screen reader.  In fact, most Palms lack
acceptable sound hardware.  Products like the BrailleNote from Humanware use
CE as a platform, but run a speech-enabled application on the OS that
provides a static set of limited PDA functions.

There has recently been a release of Emacs 20.7 for a few Windows CE
handhelds, including the HP Journada (which has a keyboard).  While we may
be stuck with using speech-enabled applications on mainstream handhelds, I
believe that Emacs would provide a far superior PDA interface over packages
like the BrailleNote's KeySoft software.

Here is the URL to Emacs for CE:
http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/

Emacs is already available, Emacspeak could be made available, but the final
part of this package, the speech synthesizer, may present
problems.  There aren't many software-based synthesizers available that
could yield the type of customizable speech that we're accustomed to with
the DECtalk, and none of them are currently free (to my knowledge).  ETI
Eloquence claims that their synth will be available for CE shortly.  This
should make it possible to carry over much of the work that was done for
support of OutLoud, but there is no definitive info as to when Eloquence for
CE will be available.

Does anyone have an idea for a synth to use (free or otherwise) or a better
route to follow for bringing Emacspeak to CE handhelds?

Bryan



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