People with disability who relied on built-in TTS (text to speech) application in OSX or Vista will be disappointed with the fact that most popular Linux distributions does not have any TTS applications installed by default. While researching for a friend in need, I bumped in to Festival, the de-facto TTS project for Linux Systems. Fedora and Debian based distro users can install festival or flite package from their respective package manager. These are both CLI apps.

For a more practical usage via a proper UI, you can check out KDE Accessibility package which comes with KTTSmgr a front-end GUI manager for festival with very extensive options and kmouth a GUI for text to speech.

KTTS Manager

Kmouth

I probably would have never known about the state of TTS application for Linux if I didn’t have to research for a disable friend and I was a bit surprised to learn that it doesn’t come installed by default. Do any of you rely on any accessibility application on Linux systems? If so, how would you compare it with OSX and Vista Accessibility options?