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

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila gmail com>]

Hi Michael,
I wonder if I should top-post? I normally do in all blind related groups and 
lists including blind-programming, in which it is the norm. But since I know 
how to do regexp searching, bottom posting is OK to me, too. I'll top post 
as you did:

About changing the desktop environment I got that figured out. Looking at 
someone else's screen shots magnified on the Web, I figured out that the 
Ubuntu Human themed login dialog has a text called options at the very lower 
left corner. And in that menu the underlined letter s stands for sessions. 
IN the dialog that pops up you can use the numbers as mnemonic keys to 
change sessions and tab twice and enter to select that session, and ok out 
of the dialog. By brute force trial and error, I figured out the correct 
item mumber, on my system. Well, I can report that Orca does not speak any 
menus in XFCE, enough said. Well, I expected that.

One of the things I don't like about Gnome is the rather crude file manager 
compared to Total Commander or xplorer 2 on the Wintel side. So, am now 
looking at Gnome commander and some gnome theming tool to see if they are to 
my liking.

About audio software, that I've tested too, Ardour seemed somewhat 
accessible in terms of control as did Audacity. But Audacity's track 
controls are not in the tab order, which is too bad. Oh yes and Rose Garden 
freezed at the logo, oh well.

As you might have guessed some things I like about Gnome include:
1. How fast orca starts up compared to the Win32 ATs.
2. How easy it is to add software, look at what's available by category, and 
install them without having to hunt stuff on the Web or watch the command 
line for typos.
3. Some of the controls. In particular I love the multi column list 
implementation in both GTK+ and orca. I can cursor through the columns I 
need manually with the arrows, normally only getting only the most important 
column but having the ability to look at the rest, too. Not only that but 
the type ahead navigation, where I can actually see the search string being 
edited with a screen reader, and which is not time out based, works great. 
My only minor gripe about that is that I'd like to use the down arrow to 
move the focus from the search field to the list being searched anyway. 
Since I often wish to navigate after the search and since the search field 
is single line, the down arrow would be free. But that's small potatoes. Of 
course, wildcard and regexp searching would rock, but that's another story.
4. How wel auto-completion works in the terminal, even spoken. Unlike in 
Winblows, I can actually continue appending further dirs effortlessly after 
tab completion. Any chance of having the Gnome terminal use the exact same 
keys as the text fields do? I've been using these keys on the Windows side 
for years, and they work much the same in Gnome and in OS X.

As to the rest of my issues:
You are right, i realized myself, too, that these large festival voices will 
probably be much more laggy than the old ones. They might be nice for 
e-books but despite having several different multi hundred meg voices in 
Windows, at the end of the day, I do use Orpheus for everything due to 
superior intelligibility.

eSpeak is Ok to me but I could use it faster than it currently goes, I 
think. Also I think part of the lag might be explained by Gnome speech 
itself rather than eSPeak. they use OSS, rather than ALSA, I think, and the 
Orca wiki states that one advantage of using speech dispatcher is less 
latency. Well, that setup seemed very hard, so I'm skipping it for the 
moment.

I'm not sure if ViaVoice would be that much better than eSPeak for me, since 
I have never gotten really used to it, being an Orpheus user. Another 
problem is that in the latest Hardy Ubuntu release, they dropped the library 
using which the LInux and ViaVoice based speech synths operate, since it is 
legacy stuff. So it will not work, if I got this correctly, in hardy anyway. 
Maybe there are ways to improve eSpeak, I'll contact the author about it.

Regarding the command line it depends. I find that new mainstream ssoftware 
is often graphical, and GUIs are easier to discover and learn, even with a 
screen reader. But for programming and sysadmin stuff, most definitely the 
CLI.

Regarding of mainstream, is there, an instant messaging client for the 
command line that could post new messages by others to my console directly? 
ANd also let me post new messages via a simple command line program? I think 
that would be neat and something know-one knew existed when I asked about it 
years ago in Debian Accessibility.

Interesting choices for SAPI most definitely. Maybe I'll get Win95 
somewhere, virtualize that in VmWare, write the Perl scripts to interface 
with speech dispatcher, and start playing around with it. But that will be a 
major project and I'm not quite ready yet. eSpeak is usable, about as nice 
as the OS X speech in terms of intelligibility, so maybe I was a bit too 
harsh on it initially.

At this point I'm happy I've gotten LInux to a good start. NOw I can 
actually start to use the system rather than play around with frustrating 
tech issues of assistive technology, <grin>.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä

Michael Whapples wrote:
> First the login issue. The X window manager can be selected via a text
> based tool (well it is possible for me using slackware), the tool is
> xwmconfig. I have only used this from a text console, but can't think of
> a reason why it won't work from a terminal window. If this doesn't work
> and you need access to a login window there is information out there on
> the internet (I think even at the Orca wiki) describing how to set up
> accessible login. I don't know how much of a difference you will notice
> if you are using orca in XFCE as it will still be using the GTK
> accessibility stuff.
>
> You then went on to TTS. If by the arctic voices you mean the multisyn,
> then tese perform very slowly and I would say are very unlikely to
> satisfy you for use with a screen reader. I am unsure why it isn't
> showing up in gnome-speech.
>
> It may be to do with your configuration, but I find that espeak is
> fairly responsive enough, and feel that some of the lag is from Orca,
> at-spi and earlier on in the chain. For some the maximum speed of espeak
> may not be enough.
>
> Another possibility you may wish to consider (not knowing if finish is
> available, although I think it supports quite a number of languages) is
> IBMTTS (what was viavoice, and is the same as eloquence). Unfortunately
> IBMTTS will cost something, and not being opensource (so you get the
> binary only) means that it has some dependencies on particular versions
> of libraries. I haven't purchased it myself (as espeak is enough) so I
> can't say what the maximum speed is.
>
> As for your final topic of using sapi voices in wine, can't say on that
> particular set up. What you could do is have your linux machine and a
> windows machine (may be windows in a VM, so long as it can be reached
> via a network connection) and you could get speech-dispatcher to send
> output to the windows machine (I have a patched version of client.py for
> speech-dispatcher which allows customisation of where speech-dispatcher
> output should be sent) and then if you are able you could create a perl
> script to behave as the speech-dispatcher server (or if you could
> compile speech-dispatcher on windows you could create an output module
> for speech-dispatcher) to use Orpheus. I don't know whether that would
> actually perform fast enough though.
>
> Don't forget, if you felt the command line was better, it is still
> available as a full environment and GUIs such as gnome, xfce are not
> required to use Linux. I very much believe that is where the real power
> of Linux still is.