Zirek

Software that reads and speaks the languages large vendors don’t get around to.

Two strands, and they meet: screen-reader support for under-served languages, and the local neural speech synthesis that makes a screen reader usable in the first place.

Screen readers

  • dengjen-nvda — NVDA add-on for fast, fully local neural text-to-speech using Piper voices. No cloud service, no account. Speech runs locally once voices are installed; downloading and previewing voices requires an internet connection. Originated as a maintenance fork of mush42/sonata-nvda (renamed from Sonata Neural Voices in v4.0.0).

  • nvdaku — Kurdish (Kurmanji) localisation for NVDA: interface translation, character descriptions, and a symbol dictionary. Dates from 2018 and is partial — see Help wanted below.

  • nvda-addon-testkit — end-to-end testing for NVDA add-ons, against a real NVDA, in CI. Built to keep the add-ons above honest across NVDA releases.

Speech synthesis

The stack underneath the add-on, originally built on Musharraf Omer's work:

  • dengjen-tts — cross-platform Rust engine for neural TTS models (Piper, Kokoro, MeloTTS).

  • dengjen-piper-rs — Rust bindings for running Piper TTS models directly, independent of the full dengjen engine.

  • dengjen-tashkeel — diacritic (tashkeel) restoration for Arabic. Arabic is normally written without the short vowels a synthesizer needs, so they have to be inferred before anything can be spoken.

Kurmanji phoneme support is contributed upstream to espeak-ng rather than kept here, so it reaches every project that uses it.

Help wanted

Kurmanji is badly served by assistive technology, and most of the gap needs native speakers rather than programmers:

  • Reviewing the NVDA interface translation in nvdaku — partial and dated.

  • Character descriptions and symbol names — judgement calls that someone who isn’t a daily speaker shouldn’t be making alone.

  • Voice recordings for text-to-speech training.

Sorani and Zazaki speakers are just as welcome; the work is Kurmanji-first only because that’s where it started.

On the synthesis and add-on side:

  • Windows testers for dengjen-nvda, especially against current NVDA releases.

  • Co-maintainers. Every add-on and engine here has one maintainer, which is one too few.

  • Developers to extend the Rust/Python/Java bindings and fix issues across dengjen-tts, dengjen-piper-rs, and dengjen-tashkeel’s multi-language surface.

And for this documentation site:

  • Writers to expand the docs beyond the current README-derived starting point — tutorials, troubleshooting guides, and architecture notes are all still missing.

  • Translators, once there’s enough documentation written to be worth translating.

Open an issue on the relevant repository — for anything that sounds wrong, include the exact text and what it should sound like. See CONTRIBUTING.md; you do not need to write code to help.

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