Re: [orca-list] miscellaneous Orca comments

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:13:50AM -0400, Janina Sajka wrote:
> So, this should present a well integrated gui+console environment.

One might think so, but regrettably it doesn't. Every application that uses
the Emacspeak speech server (Orca, Emacspeak itself, Yasr, etc.) will simply
start its own instance of the speech server. If they're all contending for the
same sound card, or the same hardware synthesizer, simultaneously, then
conflicts arise.

Speech dispatcher is the only service I am aware of that attempts to deal with
multiple speech applications that may be active at the same time.

Problems have been reported to the Emacspeak list which result if you try to
run Emacspeak under X with Orca loaded. I don't know whether any solution has
been found short of temporarily deactivating speech via the Orca preferences.

In contrast with speech, BRLTTY makes it straightforward to switch between
Orca and the console with apparently no problems or conflicts, so far as I can
tell from having experimented with it briefly for testing purposes.