Re: [orca-list] Fw: Revisiting Orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Mitchell:

Happy New Year!

> Firstly I have to say I think the OpenSolaris guys have done a great job 
> of creating a very accessible live CD and installation system, and I had 
> no problems installing it with out any sighted assistance.

Yeah!  Glad to hear this.

> I did want to enquire as to the responsiveness of Orca however, as it 
> seems a bit sluggish, even though it is running on a core2 duo 3.13 GHZ 
> with 4GB of ram at it's disposal.
>  
> I am just running the default Orca that installed with OpenSolaris, 
> however I do intend to grab the version out of SVN at some point in the 
> near future.
>  
> I am also using espeak as installed with the OS, although I am 
> considering purchasing a license of Dectalk for Solaris.
>  
> I was wondering if anyone had any optimization tips however, to make 
> Orca a bit more responsive.

There are any number of variables that might come into play here.  Since 
others have reported that Orca is pretty snappy in their systems, 
however, we might be able to reduce this down to the specific 
application you are using and how you are interacting with it.

> Things of particular note are on the initial screen when Orca first 
> loads and asks you to select the language, you can't silence speech and 
> have to wait for it to read the entire list.

You *should* be able to silence it just by typing the voice selection 
and pressing return.

> Also when I have a bash prompt open and I have a lot of text scrolling 
> past, it is very hard to silence Orca even after tabbing away from that 
> window.

There might be some sort of buffering issue going on.  In addition, I 
chose kind of a simple route for managing the eSpeak audio output, and I 
think buffering up big chunks of stuff can make interrupting speech slow 
down a small amount.

> In a document when arrowing down, there is a definite lag between what 
> I'm doing with the keyboard and what is being spoken.

Which application are you using (e.g., Firefox?) and how fast are you 
arrowing?

Will