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

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

Good morning,

I'm late coming to this discussion, unfortunately.  I use Emacspeak
but have never been able to get it to work with Orca.  I don't think
this is Orca's fault though.  From what I have ben able to gather,
Emacs itself causes at-spi to choke.  Alt tabbing out of Emacs and, by
extension Emacspeak causes the system to stall for a few ticks and
then start working again.  Control alt right or left arrow to switch
work spaces does the same thing.  Some work-arounds I've tried have
been running Emacspeak in xterm which Orca does not support and with a
-nw flag to disable the gtk support and also running it in gnome
terminal with the same flag on it but there, Orca talks over
Emacspeak.  In xterm, the meta keys for emacs don't work.  You have to
use escape sequences which is a very fool-proof recipe for driving one
absolutely bonkers in short order.

I didn't like how it acted in both instances so, I personally decided
to run Emacspeak only in console and not in x.  This has worked out
well for me.  If any Orca code needs to exist for Emacspeak, it is
something that would disable at-spi support for that application only
and inform Orca that it is a self voicing application.  This would
allow one to cut and paste from Emacs to other applications in Gnome
and use Emacs as default editor for some IDE's like Anjuta and PIDA,
for instance.  I'd be awesome.  If Orca can't disable at-spi only for
one application and leave all others alone, I for one don't see any
reason for Orca to support Emacspeak at this time until whatever
causes at-spi to freeze Gnome can be resolved.  I think it's a bug
with Emacs and Metacity though I encountered this with ice WM and
Compiz WM as well so, who can really say there.

Hope this helps,
Alex M

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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