  Text-to-speech technology has been broadly used to help people with voice
disabilities to overcome their difficulties. With text-to-speech, a person
types at a keyboard, the text is synthesized, and the sound comes out through
the computer speakers.
  In recent years, Voice over IP (VoIP) applications have become very popular
and have been used by people worldwide. These applications allow people to talk
for free over the Internet and also to make traditional calls through the
Public-Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) at a small fraction of the cost
offered by traditional phone companies.
  We have created a system, called EasyVoice, which integrates speech
synthesizers with VoIP applications. The result allows a person with motor
impairments and voice disabilities to talk with another person located anywhere
in the world. The benefits in this case are much stronger than the ones
obtained by non-disabled people using VoIP applications. People with motor
impairments sometimes can hardly use a regular or mobile phone. Thus, the
advantage is not only the reduction in cost, but more important, the ability to
talk at all.
