Re: Orca Using speackup and orca simultaniously (was: New to the list)

[Lukas Loehrer <listaddr1 gmx net>]

> > Terry Klarich writes:
> > > Can speakup and orca run together at the same time?  I would like to maintain my boot up accessibility.
> > Yes, but only if you're using different speech devices. This will be
> > easy if you're using a hardware speech synth with Speakup.

The probelm here is OSS, and its inability to do software mixing
easily. As long  as you are using a single program that insists on using OSS
and does not work with the alsa-OSS compatibility wrapper (aoos),
there will be problems with audio device contention. 

In the context of orca and speakup, the culprit is probably festival
and the way it is used by gnome-speech. Speakup uses speech-dispatcher which
supports alsa natively. Unfortunately, I did not get festival to work
with the aoos wrapper program under Edgy, so it is limited to OSS when
it is used for audio playback. the version of festival I
tried from Edgy is rather ancient, so current festival versions might
be different in this respect, i.e. either support alsa natively or at
least work with aoss. For the moment, a partial solution might be to
use festival through speech-dispatcher instead of gnome-speech, but I
have not tried this myself.

Another solution altogether is to use a sound card that supports
multiple channels in hardware. this is probably not a viable option
for most people, especially notebook users.

Best regards, Lukas