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

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
I think you may have got the wrong end of the stick here.

Firstly dealing with the issue you discuss. Orca can be totally silenced 
for an application by associating the self_voicing.py script with the 
application (the file self_voicing.py can be found in the orca script 
directory, eg. on my system 
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/orca/scripts/self_voicing.py). I think 
associating it can be done by copying it to a script of the same name as 
the application (still keeping the .py extension). Does this help with 
using emacs as a gtk application for you?

Now to what was being asked. Emacspeak has the emacspeak speech servers 
to allow access in a common way to a number of speech synthesisers. 
Currently orca does support the emacspeak speech server system as a way 
of communicating with speech synthesisers. Unfortunately changes need to 
be made to the speech output part of orca which would mean working on 
the orca code which interfaces with emacspeak speech servers. Its 
unfortunate as it means more work than if orca only supported one speech 
communication system (IE. speech-dispatcher), and so it has been 
proposed to drop support for the emacspeak speech server output system. 
Currently the emacspeak speech servers are the only way to have orca 
work with a hardware synthesiser (NOTE: not all the synthesisers 
supported by emacspeak speech servers are included in this feature 
anyway, eg. my apollo isn't although I could use my apollo with emacspeak).

Hope this has been useful.

Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/37 20:59, Alex Midence wrote:
> 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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