KWord has a nicely-functioning speech-to-text capability; it will speak the names of every command in the menus and toolbars. It will also read your own typed text to you. To enable this you need to install the KDE accessibility packages, KTTS (KDE Text to Speech), and the Festival text-to-speech engine. These are packaged differently (as usual) on different distributions. PCLinuxOS has kdeaccessibility-kttsd and festival. Ubuntu and Debian users get kdeaccessibility, kttsd, and festival, plus you must also select a speaker such as festvox-kallpc16k, which is the American English male speaker for Festival. (Run apt-cache search festival to find all the available speakers.)

After installing these, open KWord and go to the Settings--TTS menu. Check the boxes as shown in Figure 1 and click OK. It will then ask you to configure a Talker for KTTS. The KTTS configuration menu should open on the Talker tab. Click the Add button; it will automatically scan your system for available talkers, as Figure 2 shows. Click Apply. Then go to the General tab and make sure that "Enable text-to-speech system (KTTSD)" is checked. Click OK and you're done. Now hover your cursor over any menu command to hear it spoken. It won't speak the main "File, Edit, View" etc. headings, but it will everything else.

Want to hear your own typed text spoken robotically? Click View--Show document structure, which opens a tree view of all of your document elements on the left. Expand Text Frames/Frame Sets, right-click on the frame you want to hear, and select Speak Text. The one thing I haven't figured out how to do is make it stop reading- it keeps going until it's finished, or you close KWord.

Well there are just a few of the things you can do with KWord. Visit the links in Resources for good information on KWord's ODF (Open Document Format) support, and user manuals and help.

Resources

• Key KOffice Developers Talk About KOffice 2 and Open Standards
• KWord
• There is a great quotation on the friends of KOffice wiki:

  "There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. --C. A. R. Hoare"

« Back: Don't Get Lost In Long Documents