Re: [orca-list] braille compared to speech

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 03:37:18PM +0200, Hermann wrote:
> - Why isn't it possible to increase Orca's responsiveness in braille?
> When I perform any action using my braille display (Alva Satellite 544),
> I have to wait a few seconds till I see a result? And when the screen has
> a lot of content, this amount of seconds rises, so in Thunderbird with a
> large inbox.

My experience is that the braille display is updated much more quickly than
the speech (I'm using a Baum SuperVario 40 display, also known as Brailliant
40 outside Europe.)

On my laptop using Gnome-speech and eSpeak, I can generate delays by moving
through a Web page quickly with the cursor keys, whereas the braille display
is updated immediately. The problem isn't limited to Firefox and can be
reproduced elsewhere.

On my desktop system, everything - both braille and speech - is extremely
responsive.

Laptop hardware: 1.8ghz AMD Athlon64 CPU, 1gb RAM.

Desktop hardware: two dual-core Intel Xeon CPUs at 2.33 ghz, 4gb RAM.

Software: Debian Sid on both systems.

This issue has been discussed in the past on the mailing list; I haven't
repeated the test with a version of Gnome-speech that includes the eSpeak
driver fix that was made available for testing a few months ago.

Obviously, there is a crucial difference between Hermann's system and mine
that explains his performance problems and my lack of them.
> - Why is it not possible to use the line-left line-right commands of my
> display to scroll the screen, so for example in FF, where I have to use
> line-up line-down to scroll one line for/back and then line-left
> line-right to read the second part of the current line?

I agree this should be fixed.
> Finally: Is it possible to use Orca with braille only? 

Have you tried turning speech off in the preferences?

A serious problem with braille support is that some information is presented
in speech but not in braille (usually, messages that aren't currently
focused). There needs to be a standard means of doing this, for example,
presenting the message on the braille display with a configurable time-out,
before returning to the focused item.