[DECtalk] New participant

[Jason J.G. White]

Dear community,

As a long-standing DECtalk enthusiast who has been following recent 
developments with interest, I thought now would be the right time to 
join the community on this mailing list.

My DECtalk usage began in 1992 with a DECtalk-PC card and the JAWS for 
DOS screen reader. I was completing secondary school at the time. A few 
years later, I found myself at university in an undergraduate course on 
French phonetics and the grammar of spoken French. The course was taught 
by a linguist (appointed shortly thereafter to a Chair in the 
department) who knew Dr. Tony Vitale of Digital Equipment Corporation, a 
DECtalk developer. As I remember from my correspondence with Tony 
Vitale, a French language version of DECtalk was being worked on but 
wasn't available then - it didn't happen in time for me to make use of it.

I later bought a DECtalk Express shortly after Digital Equipment 
Corporation was acquired by Compaq, and used it with T.V. Raman's 
Emacspeak software under Linux.

The next move was to purchase software DECtalk from Fonix Corporation 
(the 32-bit x86 version for Linux) in the early 2000s. If I remember 
rightly, it was version 4.63, and, regrettably, there were real issues 
of speech quality. My correspondence with Edward Bruckert indicated he 
was working on the issues and, as I remember, he was modeling aspects of 
the DECtalk Express as part of an effort to implement software improvements.

I checked the Fonix Web site at various times in hope of a 64-bit x86 
version, but it never appeared - at least not for sale to the public.

That's the entire history prior to my becoming aware of the recent 
DECtalk revival effort. DECtalk played an important role in my education 
from secondary school through to Ph.D., together with braille display 
technology. It also supported my accessibility-related involvement 
(international Web accessibility standards participation, Linux and 
open-source community participation, etc.).

At this point, I'm keen to partiicpate in the community and to 
contribute to the future of DECtalk in some way. I'm especially 
interested in the Linux environment (Emacspeak as well as Orca). 
Comments by Josh Kennedy on the Orca mailing list inspire hope that the 
future of DECtalk looks positive, including for users who are blind, so 
perhaps this is a good moment to join in.