[orca-list] Different card for speech output - sound on feisty

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
To set a different card for speech output, it depends on what speech
system you are using. Probably the simplest is espeak with
speech-dispatcher. For this you will need to look at how aplay changes
to a different card for output, command such as 
aplay --help
or the man pages for aplay will tell you (assuming you want to use
alsa). Now modify the espeak-generic.conf file in your speech-dispatcher
installation, you will find a line which is what gets executed, just add
your options after the aplay command on that line and restart
speech-dispatcher.

Possibly another way (I haven't checked it) is to modify gnome-speech's
bonobo activation file (see previous postings) so that aoss is used. Now
you will need to write a asoundrc configuration file to map dsp0 to the
card you want for speech output. You may want to make another dsp in the
asoundrc file for other oss apss (although you will need to configure
them to use that). Set your alsa default card to the one you want and
now hopefully things should work on a restart.

Neither is perfect, one uses speech-dispatcher which while working well
enough for general use (I have been using orca that way until about 30
minutes ago) it does have some issues (partly caused by the temp file
for communication between the different apps (eg. if you are typing fast
and speech goes unresponsive, so there are a few words buffered (I am
using word echo only), it will say the last word as many times as the
number of words buffered), and partly speech-dispatcher will
occasionally crash (it is occasional for me)).

There might be other ways as well, there are normally more than one way
to solve a problem when you look at it deeply.

From
Michael Whapples