Re: Orca newbi: need help on finding dependencies for orca setup for ubuntu

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

> You might want to consider gnopernicus and orca are rather fussy and 
> tempermental if they are not started correctly. For example, for 
> whatever reason if you run orca or gnopernicus from the run dialog they 
> will completely crash gnome-panel and then the desktop.

Or...rather than point the finger at the assistive technology, the run
dialog is fussy when run with accessibility.  :-)  This is a known
crasher in gtk+ and has been logged (and fixed):

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326362

> A case in point where this will crash the screen reader is gaim when 
> send or recieve notifications sound orca will suddenly die, and has to 
> be restarted. To avoid it I just turn those sounds off.

Which speech synthesizer are you using?  Some of the device contention
issues occur because of the way the speech synthesizer accesses the
audio device, which is out of Orca's control.  For example, I often need
to disable the enlightenment sound deamon on my machine for speech to
work.  Also similar to this is the way audio in general is handled on
the operating system, which is also sensitive to which sound card is on
the machine.  IMO, audio is a bit of a quagmire on Linux.

Unfortunately, the beast on the top of the stack is usually the one to
take the blame for all the toxic waste it unknowingly eats.  :-(  But,
we just resign ourselves to the fact that much of our job is to track
down and help others resolve bugs in their products.  We also try to
develop workarounds that will work both in the presence and absence of
the bugs we find.

While the above may sound daunting, the positive side of all of this is
that we have a thriving community of users and testers that help us find
and fix bugs, too.  We love that!

Will