News - December 22, 2007
CLC core TTS and utilities libraries updated: The CLiCk, Speak Bundle now uses the latest versions of the the core TTS and utilities libraries. The updated versions of these libraries several optimizations and minor bug fixes.
Since the beginning of launching CLiCk, Speak, one of my goals has been for CLiCk, Speak to be a useful tool in improving literacy. Thus I am very pleased to announce that Wildflower USA has decided to use CLiCk, Speak for that very purpose and has put up an online version of the Furello book that was optimized for CLiCk, Speak at the "Listen to Furello" link on that page. The Furello series has been used in the Texas educational system to boost literacy and has won an award from the Native American Arts Council.
To everyone who's asked me about where to get voices for French and Spanish, I am happy to announce that there are now commercial voices available for those languages on the Additional Voices page. There are also voices for Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean - as well as English voices that are much higher quality than what you get by default with Windows.
CAST deserves a special round of applause for their support and encouragement on this project.
Some of you may have noticed a bug that causes the page to sometimes scroll back to the top when a link is clicked. This is a known bug in Firefox 2.0 itself, and the Mozilla developers are on it. An added incentive for downloading this CLiCk, Speak extension is that it contains a workaround for automatically squishing this bug in many cases. Note that this bug should be fixed in the next Firefox update. Also, even in the current version of Firefox, this bug will not appear if caret navigation mode is off (press F7 to toggle the caret off).