[DECtalk] New participant

[Karen Lewellen]

Welcome Jason!
I do recall there was a reading edge card edition in French.  the card 
would, as the edge does itself, read scanned materials in the language.  I 
do not know if, as the edge also does, the screen reader edition also 
provided french though.
hope you enjoy your time here,
Karen



On Sat, 3 Feb 2024, Jason J.G. White via Dectalk wrote:

> 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.
>
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