eGuideDog

(Sep 13, 2009)

The eGuideDog project is to write different kinds of software for the blind. The technical goal is to build an easy-to-use Linux distribution for the blind.

eSpeak is an TTS written in C++ and the software structure is much simpler than Festival. It supports both Mandarin and Cantonese of Chinese now. Anyone like linguistics and Chinese can join us to improve the package eSpeak-Chinese. I've also wrote a Perl module extension for eSpeak (Speech::eSpeak). However, Some functions have not been implemented for my poor Perl skill.

Ekho(余音) TTS, the key software we are writing at the moment. Unlike eSpeak, Ekho is designed in an easier way but bigger package size. It may produce more natural voice than eSpeak because it uses human voice. It supports Cantonese and Mandarin now. And we are trying to implement the SAPI 5 interface. After this is done, we will try to help improving some existing open source screen readers.

eGuideDog voice web browser is focus on how to present HTML in speech rather than in text. It's written in Perl and supports eSpeak TTS engine. Some techniques Such as re-constructing the HTML structure, summarizing the content and filtering Ads. etc will be used. This package is obsoleted now. Instead, we are trying to help to improve WebAnywhere. And we are planing to write plug-in for Firefox.