[nfbcs] FW: Announcing Phonemic 1.0

[Rasmussen, Lloyd]

This is a wrapper program that simplifies the process of providing speech from Java programs.  It is not a full Java access solution, and is not a new TTS engine.  It was developed as part of the SodBeans project, which is creating an environment for teaching programming to blind people using sound as its primary output.  Preliminary testing of SodBeans was done at the Washington School for the Blind, and updates to the whole SodBeans project are on SourceForge.  You can contact the poster of this message at Andreas Stefik [stefika at gmail.com] .

Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Project Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress   202-707-0535
http://www.loc.gov/nls
The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS.



-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce at freelists.org [mailto:programmingblind-bounce at freelists.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Stefik
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2011 4:11 PM
To: programmingblind at freelists.org
Subject: Announcing Phonemic 1.0

All,

My team would would like to officially announce the release of software product called Phonemic. Phonemic 1.0 is an open-source library for doing screen-reader compatible text-to-speech in Java.
Phonemic can be used on a host of operating systems and is the same text-to-speech engine used in the Sodbeans project and in the Hop programming language. It can be downloaded from our sourceforge page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/phonemic/

Here are our official release notes:

= Phonemic version 1.0, June 1, 2011 =

== Introduction ==
This is the first official release of the Phonemic speech library.
Phonemic is a Java library that allows its users to write cross-platform speaking applications.

== Big Features ==
 * Support for many major speech systems, including Microsoft SAPI, JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver and ORCA.
 * Provides a single API to communicate with all engines.
 * Support for various types of speech modifications (when available):
	* Volume control
	* Pitch control (either manually or automatically through the speakChar functions).
	* Speed control
 * Speech modifications are consistent across engines.
 * Support for blocking speech calls (when available).
 * Ability to query an engine for its features.
 * Ability to switch engines on the fly (Windows and Mac OS X only).
 * A queuing system that enables the use of speech priorities, even when not supported natively by the engine.
 * A speech processing mechanism to enable advanced pre-processing of speech before it is sent to an engine.
 * Ability to query for / change voice when supported by the engine.

== Supported Engines ==
Phonemic currently supports the following platforms and speech engines:

 * Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7:
	* Microsoft Speech API (SAPI)
	* JAWS
	* NVDA
 * Mac OS X
	* Carbon (on Intel Macs only), the same speech interface used by VoiceOver.
	* The `say' command
 * Linux
	* speech-dispatcher (available by default on Vinux and Ubuntu), the same speech interface used by ORCA.

== Usage ==
The Phonemic library is a .jar file that must be included in your java project. In addition to the phonemic.jar file, your program must include the appropriate JNI libraries for the various platforms you intend to support. These files can be found under the jni directory.
For more information on how to use Phonemic, see the wiki page:
	https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/phonemic/wiki/UsingPhonemic

The libraries are as follows. Note that if you do not intend to support a particular platform, you do not have to include its libraries in your distribution.

 * Windows XP (32-bit only), Windows Vista and Windows 7
	* Interop.SpeechLib.5.3.dll (SAPI supporting DLLs)
	* SappyJNI.dll (SAPI, JAWS and NVDA support, 32-bit)
	* SappyJNI64.dll (SAPI, JAWS and NVDA support, 64-bit)
	* nvdaControllerClient[32|64].dll (NVDA support)
 * Mac OS X
	* libCarbonSpeakJNI.jnilib (Carbon support)
 * Linux
	* libLinuxSpeakJNI.so (speech-dispatcher support)

A simple demo application is included as a Netbeans project under the example directory.

== Build Notes ==
Although libraries come with Phonemic pre-built, should you want to modify any of them, it is necessary to use the following systems.

 * Windows
	* To modify the Windows DLL (SappyJNI/SappyJNI64.dll), Visual Studio
2008 must be used. The libraries will build on Visual Studio 2010, however, they will not run on all systems.
 * Mac OS X
	* To modify the Carbon speech library, libCarbonSpeakJNI.jnilib, you must use XCode 3. (3.2.1 preferred) XCode 4 has not been tested.
 * Linux
	* The Linux library (libLinuxSpeakJNI.so) can be loaded as a standard Netbeans project.

I would like to thank my team here for their work on the project, including Kim Slattery, Susanna Siebert, Melissa Stefik, and especially Jeff Wilson, the lead developer on this project.

Sincerely,

Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville