Announcing Phonemic 1.0: Cross Platform Speaking Library

My team would would like to officially announce the release of a 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 (our accessibility modules for the NetBeans Platform) 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, 201

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 and 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

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.