[orca-list] Is anyone using Orca with Emacspeak? And does speech-dispatcher support hardware synths?

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org>]

Hey guys.

We have some really old code in Orca to support Emacspeak and a few
hardware speech synthesizers. Orca's support in this area was at best
minimal. Whether or not this support is even still functional is
something I need to investigate. My question is: Is this Orca code even
needed?

Someone will almost certainly say: "Might as well keep it in. What harm
does it do?" One of the things which is prompting my question is that I
want to look at finishing and integrating the plugin support work. And
one of the things that will be made "pluginable" are presentation
modalities (speech, braille, etc.). So really what I am asking is: Do we
need to take the time to do the work to convert this old code as part of
the plugin work, or can we just drop it?

As a related aside, in an ideal world, speech-dispatcher would support
everything we need. And maybe it already does. I still need to
investigate this as well. But if anyone happens to know definitively if
speech-dispatcher supports hardware speech synthesizers and wants to
save me some googling, I'd be most appreciative of the answer. <smiles>

Thanks guys! Take care.
--joanie