Re: Orca Reading dialogue boxes and upper case pitch

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

This message seems to have been sent before Cody and I talked, but I've
only just now seen it.  So...although Cody is up and running now, the
answers to these questions will still be useful to someone.

>   I just wanted to know if there was a command that will allow orca to
> read entire dialogue boxes

We have it spec'd out, but not implemented yet.  The overall key
bindings for Orca are spec'd out here, along with when we plan to
actually support them:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/orca/docs/doc-set/orca.html#STYLEGUIDE.  We might pull things in a 
little bit if time permits.

> Also, what is the command to read text files or any sort of document
> from top to bottom. 

KP_+ (the "+" key on the numeric keypad) is what we use to do this.  It
will start reading from the current caret position and should keep
reading until you hit a key or it hits the end of the document.  When
it's interrupted/done, it should also reposition the caret somewhere
close to where the speech stopped.

>   If there is a command to access a menu bar, what is it? I know that
> one may sound silly, but in order to access the menu bar, I need to
> press alt O or alt C or something. but I'm talking about just getting
> focus to the menu bar itself, and not a menu.

F10 should hopefully be the magic key to do this, regardless of what is
in the menu bar.

>   Also i wanted to make the point that When adjusting the uppercase
> pitch in orca, I see it Not changing. I have it set to 7.0 and the
> regular 5.0. What should I do here. Also, Orca talks very boringly, and
> doesn't have much tone when there is a question mark or an exclamation
> point. Is there a way around this?

Most of these are a function of the underlying synthesis engine, and we
have little control over it.  

With respect to pitch, the gnome-speech driver for festival does not
allow pitch to be set (see
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150523), so setting it won't
work, either.  I suppose the config GUI could potentially gray out the
sliders for unsupported parameters to avoid confusion, though.

Hope this helps,

Will