[orca-list] orca stops speaking with speech dispatcher

[Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com>]

Hi Everyone
I'm attempting to use speech dispatcher directly with Orca (not via  
its gnome-speech driver). I'm experiencing an odd issue where Orca  
will stop speaking at a place there would normally be a pause in  
speech--not a sentence pause, but a pause between items. Example: when  
in Firefox, if I use navigate to next large object, it will begin  
reading fine. However, if there is a link or anything else that would  
normally cause a pause in speech, it will stop reading. Orca doesn't  
crash, it just won't speak the rest of that object. Using different  
speech dispatcher drivers seems to introduce some variation as to  
where and when it will stop, but it eventually exhibits this problem  
with all of the drivers I've tested. So far, I've tested espeak,  
ibmtts, and the two generic drivers (dectalk and swift).
I'm switching away from gnome-speech for one main reason: stability. I  
need to keep Pulseaudio in play due to the audio driver I'm using and,  
to put it miledly, most of the gnome-speech drivers do not like being  
run through Pulseaudio wrappers and will often cause it to lock up  
gnome entirely until it is manually sent a KILL signal. Ibmtts and  
Swift are the worst at this, though dectalk has this problem as well.  
I have seen this on all gnome-speech/Pulseaudio setups not just the  
one I'm currently running. As speech dispatcher doesn't rely on the  
synthesizer to produce its audio output, but rather handles sending  
the audio data itself, it handles pulse much more gracefully and in  
fact, it certainly seems to be much more stable. If I could just get  
rid of this annoying issue with speech stopping it would be perfect.
System: Ubuntu 8.10 with all updates, speech dispatcher 0.6.7  
(provided packages), latest orca trunk
Anyone know what's going on? Should I update to speech dispatcher CVS  
perhaps?

Thanks



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