Re: [orca-list] gnome-speech seems to block orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

In looking at the gnome-speech driver for ViaVoice (which I think what 
is used for the IBMTTS engine), I see calls to ViaVoice's eciAddText 
method directly in the 'say' method.  If the call to eciAddText can 
block, then this could be what is causing the problem.

We saw something similar with the gnome-speech driver for eSpeak, and I 
worked up a patch yesterday to try to avoid the problem: 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535493 (the patch only 
applies to the gnome-speech driver for eSpeak).

Do you have other speech engines you can try?  If eSpeak is one of 
them, you'll need to apply the patch from the above bug first and 
rebuild/reinstall gnome-speech.  If you're not familiar with doing 
that, however, then don't do it.  I often forget how dangerous it is to 
place a knife in someone's hands and tell them to cut a piece of rope 
-- it's amazing, but somehow they sometimes end up slashing their 
wrists and hanging themselves in the process.  :-)

In addition, you mention that you experience this when arrowing through 
the list of e-mails in evolution.  Are you arrowing really really fast? 
 Do you experience this in other applications?  Is it associated with 
the speed at which you are typing and/or if you press and hold a key to 
cause autorepeat to kick in?

Will

On Jun 12, 2008, at 8:24 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:

> Hello,
> I will try and word this carefully so it doesn't get misunderstood.
>
> I am using gnome-speech with IBMtts, and I have modified the bonobo
> server file
> (/usr/lib/bonobo/servers/GNOME_Speech_SynthesisDriver_Viavoice.server)
> to use the Viavoice driver with ALSA's oss emulation.
>
> When using orca, at times speech starts and it seems impossible to
> interupt the speech. It appears as if the speech output is blocking
> further execution in orca, until the speech finishes, or possibly when
> it is reaching a join of speech strings sent to gnome-speech. An 
> example
> I can give is when I am cursoring through the list of emails in a 
> folder
> in evolution, orca starts speech of the item I move to, braille does 
> not
> change at this point, and no key presses seem to respond, until a good
> way through the row of the list item being spoken, at which point
> braille catches up and keys start responding. In fact when I say key
> presses don't respond, I mean orca reports nothing as happening, it
> continues what it is speaking as if nothing happened, but at the end 
> the
> key presses then all seem to happen.
>
> I have never noticed this with orca and speech-dispatcher, but at the
> moment gnome-speech seem better (a part from this problem) as there are
> a couple of things with speech-dispatcher and the IBMtts module that
> make it not so good.
>
> Is this problem an orca bug or a gnome-speech bug? Does a bug report
> already exist for this, or shall I create one.
>
> Michael Whapples
>
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