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

["David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>]

Hi,

I tested Orca using the emacspeak speech engine for about 30 minutes at 
work today.

Bottom line: Orca works very well with the emacspeak speech engine as 
long as you don't try to also run emacs with emacspeak in a console window.

The details:

I was using Ubuntu 10.10 with the version of Orca released with that 
Ubuntu release. After logging in, I reconfigured Orca to use the 
emacspeak speech engine and adjusted the parameters until I had speech 
output the way I wanted it using a DECTalk Express. I spent about a half 
hour doing work I could do using only Orca. I spent time in 
gnome-terminal, Pidgin, Firefox, gedit, and OO-writer. Everything worked 
flawlessly. At this point, I switched over to a virtual console and 
started up emacs with emacspeak. Initially, I could work in emacs 
without difficulty, but once I switched back to Orca and then back to 
emacspeak, things began to get unstable. Speech started dropping out in 
both Orca and emacs and some other issues started cropping up in emacs. 
At this point, I could no longer work efficiently, so I shut both 
sessions down, reconfigured Orca back to speech dispatcher, and then 
restarted emacs.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

dave


On 06/12/2011 10:08 PM, David E. Price wrote:
> Hi, Joanie,
>
> I'm in the group who would like to see support for hardware synths in 
> Orca. I still believe that DECTalk hardware synthesizers are the best 
> at high speeds. I use my two DECTalk Express synths with emacspeak at 
> work and at home, and just ordered a new DECTalk USB for a second 
> machine at work since I learned that they have serial ports again. 
> However, I currently use software speech synthesis in Orca because, 
> when I tested it a couple of years ago, using emacspeak's speech 
> server in gnome as well as in a virtual console resulted in squirrely 
> speech output. I'll test it tomorrow when I'm at work (Ubuntu 10.10) 
> and let you know if that is still the case.
>
> I'd love to see support for hardware synthesizers in speech 
> dispatcher, but I seem to remember that the group who developed it 
> only wants to support software speech synthesizers because of the cost 
> of hardware synthesizers. Anyone from that group can contradict me, 
> though.
>
> I'll let you know what I find.
>
> dave
>
>
> On 06/12/2011 08:16 PM, David Csercsics wrote:
> > I would like to be able to use my hardware synths as well I have usb
> > serial converters for a reason. It would make a lot of sense not to have
> > to rely on working sound systems for speech given the weird state of
> > things like pulseaudio and espeakup and per user sessions and things
> > like this. There's too many ways you can end up without speech with the
> > current Linux distro sound mess. I'm not really familiar with any of the
> > code but I have time to help sort this out if somebody wants to tell me
> > where or what to look at first. But I'm not even going to bother looking
> > at code if this is not something people want.
> > _______________________________________________
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> _______________________________________________
> orca-list mailing list
> orca-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> 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