[Wikipedia-l] Re: text to voice; learning languages

[Delirium]

Merritt L. Perkins wrote:

>        
>1. Instead of reading an Encyclopedia article from the screen would it be
>nice to be able to lean back and have it read. to you by a synthetic
>voice? I believe that such programs already exist. Would anything need to
>be done to the articles so that such programs would work?.
>. My computer has such a text to voice program in Dragon
>NaturallySpeaking 7 but it does not want to work for me. Perhaps it is
>not compatible with XP.
>  
>
This certainly sounds like a good idea.  It should be possible with 
already available text-to-speech programs, but if there is anything 
particularly problematic about Wikipedia's current formatting that makes 
it difficult to use, it would be interesting to find out about it.

>2. While it would not be part of Wikipedia would free lessons in foreign
>languages be a good idea? Once you get started you need to get practice
>using the language and Encyclopedia articles might furnish such practice.
>Is anybody interested?
>Just daydreaming.
>  
>
This sounds like a good project fot the WikiBooks project --- producing 
fully multimedia textbooks to learn a foreign language.

-Mark