[technology-pmc] Third party dependencies in ACTF project (TTS, IE and F

[Kentarou Fukuda <KENTAROU@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Technology-PMC members,

In the ACTF project, we assume some components are already installed in 
each user's environment.
Would you please let me know if these dependencies are safe for us to use 
the components, or if we need to do anything?

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1. Text-to-Speech (TTS) engines

The Text-to-Speech service component of ACTF provides an interface to use 
TTS engines from the framework. This component finds the TTS engines in 
the user's environment and provides speech output by using a TTS engine. 

Currently, this component supports the SAPI (Speech API) 5 TTS engines and 
IBM's ProTalker. In the Windows environment, Microsoft provides their SAPI 
5 engine as a default component, so at least one TTS engine is usually 
available. There are some other third-party SAPI 5 TTS engines. Users can 
select their preferred TTS engine from the preference panel.

In some cases, visually impaired people use screen readers such as JAWS or 
Window-Eyes to use their PCs. Our TTS service component automatically 
finds such screen readers, and it allows users to select their screen 
reader for speech output, too.

2. Internet Explorer

To provide access to the model (HTML DOM) of the Web content, we use IE in 
our Web browser editor.

The Ajax Tools Framework (ATF) provides similar functions with the Mozilla 
browser, and it has became the SWT Mozilla browser. In the future, we 
might be able to create an alternative Web browser editor on top of 
Mozilla browser (for linux support, etc.). At the same time, we think our 
IE browser editor has the potential to contribute to IE support in ATF. 
I'll be discussing this with the ATF team.

3. Adobe Flash player

In addition to the HTML DOM, we provide access to a model of the Flash 
object embedded in Web content. This function is automatically enabled if 
the Flash player plugin is installed in the user's environment. By using 
this function, developers can also check the accessibility of Flash 
objects. This also allows developers to control Flash content as well as 
the HTML content. 

Of course, the ACTF components can work without the Flash player.

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Please let me know if you need any further information about these 
dependencies.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Best regards,
Kentarou

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Kentarou Fukuda, Ph.D.
Tokyo Research Laboratory, IBM Japan
Tel: +81-46-215-4659
E-mail: kentarou@xxxxxxxxxx