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

[Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com>]

I tend to agree with Tomas here; hardware synths are a lot harder to
use with newer machine hardware.  However, if one could develop a
module for speech dispatcher which could talk to the modern USB ports,
those hardware boxes could find a nice home again.  I myself, do use
EmacSpeak in its own environment when in Emacs at the console but I
never use the EmacSpeak synth interface from Orca.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 06:04:23PM -0400, Thomas Ward wrote:
> Hi Joanie,
>
> I personally do not use the Emacspeak support in Orca for the primary
> reason I do not have any hardware synthesizers, and Speech-Dispatcher
> pretty much covers most of the common software TTS Engines out there
> for Linux anyway. However, Speech-Dispatcher does not have any support
> for hardware synthesizers. So my thought on the issue is  if we want
> to maintain support for older hardware synthesizers then we probably
> need to update the Emacspeak support to bring it up to current. If not
> then we should drop the Emacspeak support.
>
> Personally, I'm for dropping the support as hardware synthesizers are
> not that common any more, and most of them are incompatible with newer
> PCs. For instance, the Dectalk and Doubletalk internal cards use to
> use the ISA slots, and every computer built in the last five years or
> so all have PCI not ISA.  Almost all of the external synthesizers like
> the Dectalk Express, Keynote SA, Accent SA, etc require a serial port,
> and most new computers only have USB ports. Bottom line,  hardware
> synthesizers are dying out do to the fact that they are no longer
> compatible with newer PCs, and software TTS solutions are cheaper and
> a lot more portible anyway.
>
> HTH
>
> On 6/12/11, Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org> wrote:
> > 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
> >
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