[orca-list] Orca, Speech-dispatcher and say-all

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

I thought that I'd filed this or a similar issue a while back, but a 
search for "speech-dispatcher" reveals nothing. I'd do it again, only 
I'm not immediately sure whose issue it is.

I've noticed, on multiple machines with multiple versions of Orca, that 
using SD to read websites via say-all causes strange hangs before some 
page controls are read. Specifically, if I read a link, there may be a 
second-to-seconds-long pause before the link text is read. This has 
nothing, or very little, to do with system resources as it happens 
equally on my AMD desktop and netbook. As I recall, it doesn't happen 
with gnome-speech.

There's another odd behavior here as well. If I'm reading a site and try 
to stop a say-all by pressing ctrl, I can't seem to stop it when there's 
a delay in progress. Sometimes, especially before long lists of links, 
there may be a 10-second pause on my netbook, so naturally I want to 
stop speech and navigate past the troublesome bit manually. Only, it is 
impossible to stop speech unless something is actually being spoken. I 
guess that, during these pauses, Orca doesn't register that it is 
speaking and, as such, can't cancel the say-all.

Finally, I filed another issue a while back wherein the cursor seems to 
jump around mysteriously in Firefox. IIRC a sanity check wwas added to 
help with this, and it mostly did, but the issue still occasionally 
happens. I wonder if it is related to this SD issue? Perhaps during a 
say-all focus is being moved, and when I enter a command during one of 
these pauses (I.e. ctrl-l) it doesn't cancel speech. Instead, it moves 
to the location bar with the say-all still running, then when the 
say-all processes its next chunk, focus bounces to wherever this happens 
to be. As such, my attempt at typing in a location gets interpreted as a 
whole bunch of structural nav commands which, due to the SN slowness, 
causes me to sit through a minute or two of Orca interpreting half of a 
URL as me bouncing to random page elements. :)

I guess my first question, other than "WTF?" of course, is whose issue 
this is? Orca's? Speech-dispatcher's Python bindings? On one hand, Orca 
is the user-visible app demonstrating this issue, but on the other, it 
clearly handles say-all fine either via gnome-speech or when using SD to 
review non-rich content.

Next, I'm wondering if this issue might be made a priority? I can't seem 
to find the original I filed, but at the time I think I was told that 
Orca's SD support was experimental and the issue may have been closed. 
If this is the case, I'm not sure why it wasn't just left open and 
marked for a far future fix, especially as SD is now becoming the 
default solution and this support won't be experimental then, especially 
in light of my recent thoughts on what other consequences this may be 
causing. Do closed issues not appear on search results?

I'll be happy to file another issue if needed. i'd have done so already, 
since it would have taken less time than did typing this email, but I 
don't know where to file it. :)

Thanks.