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

["Albert Sten-Clanton" <albert e sten_clanton verizon net>]

I almost never used emacspeak, but sure agree with Steve about the
desirability of having hardware speech devices usable some way or other.
More than once, and recently, I'd have been screwed royally but for my
TripleTalk LT.  

Al

-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list-bounces gnome org [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On
Behalf Of Steve Holmes
Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2011 8:29 PM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Is anyone using Orca with Emacspeak? And does
speech-dispatcher support hardware synths?

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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_______________________________________________
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orca-list gnome org
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Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to
help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp