Last week I spent a lot of time writing code. The results were a better POST/GET variables management in the transmission of web forms and the totally experimental integration of the Festival Text-to-Speech engine.
This last feature makes Farfalla read aloud the contents of web pages. When the project will be stable, all this tools will be selectable in accordance with the specific needs of every user. Vocal browsing can be useful to people with visual impairments.
Go on readin “Yet another video demo”
Last week I started writing some code for the new Farfalla release. As I decided to develop it like a browser-in-the-browser program, I started building a web page wrapper.In its present state, the program can only browse web pages, using a simple HTML form to enter website addresses instead of using the browser’s main navigation bar. This is the first implementation of the abstraction layer discussed before: it can change the way URLs are inserted, independently from the browser being used.From a technical point of view, this is possible thanks to the strong use of javascript for filtering mouse and keyboard events: every time a key is pressed it sends a code number to the web browser. Intercepting this code associates almost any action to the code number through javascript. This has a complication: key codes are not standardized among browsers, so the very difficult task will be to make every browser behave alike - this problem is well known as Cross Browser Compatibility.
