[orca-list] Login Desktop, CMU Arctic, SAPI via Wine?

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila gmail com>]

Hi, some sort of Orca related indirect questions. If there's a more specific 
list for generic things like these, feel free to point me to that in stead.

1. How do I change the login desktop from Gnome to XFCE experimentally, to 
test the latter's accessibility? I installed the Xubuntu meta package but 
cannot find a GUI option under login screen for changing the actual desktop. 
Most graphical instructions talk about a sessions tab or button in the login 
screen but I need one of magnification, speech or Braille to use that unless 
you can give me a sequence of hotkey presses doing the trick. I'm still 
using GDM.

2. I installed and configured one of the CMU Arctic voices for Festival as 
detailed here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=677277

Festival sees the voice OK and can use it but I don't see the voice at all 
in Orca under Gnome speech. I've been unable to find any docs on which 
config file to edit, to get arctic voices showing, either, and have Googled 
a lot, actually. I am not using speech dispatcher and the speech test 
program doesn't show my particular arctic voice. All the Festival voices I 
installed via Synaptic, however, do show OK automagically, as do the Finnish 
suopuhe voices.

So, any help in getting this voice to work could be great. Though I reckon 
there's even more latency than in the other Festival voices. Oh well, even 
eSpeak is too slow at the fastest setting for me and two laggy compared to 
Meridian One Orpheus I have in Win32. This is a major productivity, 
intelligibility and comfort drop which makes Linux feel unfairly inferior. 
Just imagine a font that would be half as slow to read when you count all 
the greedy speech interrupting and very fast browsing of familiar text like 
menus. This is very subjective, of course, I've been using various versions 
of Orpheus for 10 years, but still, as an end user, I feel this may be for 
me personally one of the biggest remaining hurdles to overcome in LInux 
accessibility. Other major stuff such as FInnish speech, some music 
softtware to play with, and color customization of Gnome, have been taken 
care of over the years, which is just great. I've already installed 
Audacity, Ardour and Rose Garden but haven't tested any of them yet. They 
should use GTk2 to my knowledge.

Which brings me to:

3. Is it possible to run SAPI voices and Windows-based Perl scripts under 
Wine? if so I just might be able to, some day, write a Perl script to wwhich 
the generic speech dispatcher interface sends stuff over the network, which 
then forwards it to my Win32 SAPI version of Orpheus 3 using COM. Not at all 
sure about any lag, but technically, this should be doable, and something 
I've wanted for years. I had that back in Debian years ago, when I ran the 
thing over a serial link and used a Win32 terminal emulator to connect to 
it. And man using the command line was so much easier, faster and I even 
felt more confident. But oh well, I'm getting OT again.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä