[Sugar-devel] How to implement TTS + highlighting

[chirag jain]

well acheiving captioning or karaoke style coloring in the same window
where the text is selected is something a difficult task. I have no
idea how it can be acheived. My idea is the same as you mentioned that
a separate window containing the selected text from the current window
will be opened. The captioning will be acheived in that separate
window not in the current window.

I will mention it specifically in my proposal also.
On 4/2/09, Benjamin M. Schwartz <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
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> James Simmons wrote:
>> As you point out in your proposal, highlighting the word as it is spoken
>> is a big part of the benefit of what you're proposing.  If all you
>> wanted to do was capture some highlighted text in the clipboard and have
>> it spoken in a voice you can configure in a control panel, that would be
>> easy, even trivial.  It's the highlighting that's difficult.
> ...
>>
>> If I had to write a facility that did what Read Etexts does outside of
>> the Activity I wouldn't know how to do it.  It seems to me that
>> highlighting is best done by the Activity itself.  I can't deny that it
>> would be useful to have all this work done as you have described without
>> the Activity knowing anything about it, but it doesn't seem feasible.
>> You'd have to have something that could work with gtk textareas, the
>> evince component Read uses, Abiword, and everything else that came along.
>
> What if we forget about showing the highlighting "in place"?  Instead, the
> TTS button can pop up a small window or palette showing the text from the
> "clipboard" (actually the PRIMARY selection[1]).  This window would use
> the widget from Read Etexts or Listen and Spell, to provide active
> highlighting.  As soon as TTS completes, the window disappears.
>
> That gives us "karaoke" highlighting with any activity that supports
> selection.
>
>> Another thing you'd have to deal with is PDFs composed of scanned in
>> book pages.  There are a lot of these around (the Internet Archive is
>> full of them) and somehow the kid trying to select words on a scanned in
>> page would have to be clued in that these words are not selectable.
>
> The interface already does this, by not allowing selections unless evince
> can extract text from the PDF.  (Note that this works even with some of
> those scanned books, which often have a layer of OCR text aligned with the
> scanned images, invisible until you start a selection.)
>
> - --Ben
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection#Clipboard
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