ML-FireVox

Free screen reader for Firefox browser

with support for italian and english voices

 

 

FireVox  is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser.

 

Thanks to this software, blind men and visually impaired people can read the content of a web page using the popular browser released by Mozilla Foundation.

FireVox has been originally developed by Charles L. Chen. The software can use various voice interfaces, like SAPI 5, Java FreeTTS, Orca, EmacSpeak and Mac TTS.
 

FireVox is based on CLC-4-TTS JavaScript library. The source code is released under the terms of GPL license vers. 2.
 

Unfortunately, the original version of FireVox doesn't support the italian language.

For this reason, Filippo Battaglia, a researcher of Visilab Research Center of the University of Messina, has modified the original version of the software, in order to integrate that with ML-FreeTTS library.

The result is ML-FireVox, a free screen reader for italian users. The program can use both FreeTTS english voice and ML-FreeTTS italian voice without differences.

 

Compatibility

 

As the original version of the FireVox add-on did not support Firefox vers. 3.6.X, some months ago Filippo Battaglia has released ML-FireVox 1.0.0, a modified version designed to be compatible with the version 3.6 of the popular Mozilla web browser.

 

At beginning from the version 1.0.2, ML-FireVox was made fully compatible also with the Gecko 2.0 engine, which is used by the versions 4.0 and further of the Mozilla web browser. The support for the binary interface for Microsoft Speech API was added, too. 

 

The current version of ML-FireVox is compatible with the versions 3.x-9.x of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

 

In other terms, you can use ML-FireVox on any version of the Mozilla browser actually released.

 

Installation

 

Firefox users can install ML-FireVox directly via browser using a wizard accessible here.

 

Documentation ed usage

 

As ML-FireVox is only a modified version of Chen's FireVox, it supports all functionalities that were part of the original release. So, if you want to read some documentation about the usage or the features of the program, you can find them here.

 

Furthermore, you can find some informations that are specific for ML-FireVox in this document.

 

Where you can find the source code

 

As ML-FireVox is an open project, it is important to know where the source can be found.

 

For the 3 Javascript libraries making up ML-FireVox (clc-firevox, clc-4-tts,and clc-utils) the sources can be found... in the same .xpi file used for redistribution, and downloadable here.

In fact, we redistribute ML-FireVox using the .xpi file format only because, in this way, Firefox can recognize and automatically install the screen reader, who is seen by the browser like an extension. However, .xpi is only a zip file with a replaced extension. So, opening the .xpi file and exploring the content, you'll be able to find the sources that interest you. You can open a .xpi file using a program like 7-zip.

 

The source of the Java libraries CLC4TTS_IT_Java.jar and CLC4TTS_UK_Java.jar, can be found in this section of the site (see the note in that page).

 

Under Windows, ML-FireVox uses a binary component (CLC.dll) for compatibility with Microsoft Speech API. The developers can find the source code of this library here.

 

Sponsors

 

ML-FireVox has been developed by CECUM (Centro di calcolo Università di Messina) in collaboration with VISILAB (Computer Vision and Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Messina) with the support of the governmental project "Innovazione nell'area dello stretto", sponsored by CNIPA (Centro Nazionale per l'Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione - Italy).

 

License and terms of use

 

ML-FireVox is free software. You can redistribute it under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL v2).  See the file README.PDF in the package for further details.

 

This project is mantained by Filippo Battaglia. If you have some questions about it, you can contact me at the mail address: filbattaglia@libero.it