[Idle-dev] Making Python Speech-Friendly Under IDLE

[JP S-C]

-- David Scherer <dscherer@milliway.kssacct.com>
wrote:

> It might also be hard to reliably tell the 
> difference between, say, "tab tab tab tab" and "tab 
> tab tab tab tab".

True.  What about saying "x number of tabs"? 

> Indentation is better than this precisely because
> it's a visual effect that clearly groups statements 
> together without interfering with their meaning or 
> requiring you to keep extra information in your 
> head.  The only analogous thing I can think of in 
> the audio domain is pitch.

> If it works at all, I doubt it would depend on
> musical talent.  Remember, the *key* point is that 
> you can recognize indents and dedents, which would
> be changes in pitch up and down, respectively.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am
that it might work well, even for the
non-musically-oriented.  The changes in pitch would
have to be big enough to be distinguishable.  Could
there be a problem with having so many indents that
the raise in pitch would go past the audible range? 
This would be pretty far-fetched, but I would think it
would be nice to have simple feature that read "x
number of indents" if x > 10 or something.

> If you have a speech synthesizer that can vary its
> pitch in response to control commands of some kind, 
> you could test the effect by coding samples
> of Python by hand.  If you don't have such a
> synthesizer, that's an obvious technical obstacle to

> implementing this idea :)

:-)  Yeah, that would be a problem.  Changing the
pitch of speech spoken by a software synthesizer is
very specific to the synthesizer you are using and it
would be a lot of work to add support for the common
ones.  (On another note, that's why we're trying to
create some standard interface.)

Best Regards,

--JP

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