[orca-list] Single-char silence with new Libao drivers+Orca (was Re: [ANNOUNCE] libao (new audio driver for speechd including working pulseaudio support).)

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

On 12/17/2009 11:24 AM, Halim Sahin wrote:
> Hi,
> sorry I wasn't able to understand your problem.
> 1. Can you reproduce this with speechdispatcher and another audio output
> like alsa or pulse?
>    

As much as I'd like to help debug this, I think I'll pass. This happens 
with the Pulse drivers under Ubuntu, and unfortunately, eliminating 
Pulse from my system to test will not only render it incapable of 
playing back media, something I do regularly, but will also mute sound 
on reboot and, for some reason, no amount of tweaking mixer settings via 
an SSH session will get sound back. I'll leave the potentially serious 
accessibility breakage possibilities to someone who doesn't strictly 
need it. :)

> 2. Can you give us an easy example to reproduce the problem?
>    

Sure, my original description gave you two. Type the letters in question 
and observe what does or doesn't speak, and arrow across the line of 
included characters char-by-char.


> 3. Which settings are enabled in keyecho tab of orca?
>    

The correct ones for what I want. :) Echo by character, and all the char 
types I'd like echoed. I seriously doubt this is an Orca issue, as it 
wouldn't explain the sudden inconsistency that just happened to appear 
when I switched to a new audio output method.

> 4. Maybe you can test this with gnomespeech as well?
>    

Already have and it worked fine, was using that until I switched to SD.

> 5. Can you please start a new mail thread for this?
>
>    
Done.

> Sorry!
>
>    
No need for apology. I do hope this issue can be resolved, as it makes 
some situations somewhat unworkable (typing documents is tough when I 
don't know which character I've just erased and have to trigger another 
to be read in order to find out) but under every other output method to 
date, I've been experiencing occasional lockups and have to switch to a 
TTY to restart Orca (or, in rare occasions, the entire X session.) I 
haven't needed to restart since using this driver (not that I can 
recall, anyway.) I don't think it's ever been this stable for me in 
nearly two years of regular use. If I've experienced lockups since 
Wednesday then I certainly don't remember them, and I was getting them 
at the rate of several per day. Oh, and let's not forget the constant SD 
crashes under Pulse, wherein I'd restart it half a dozen times just to 
type a single email. That wasn't fun, but neither were the alternatives, 
and now all of that appears to be gone. :)