[orca-list] Heads-up: Emacspeak support removed in Orca master/3.5.x

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Hey all.

As many of you will recall, back in January I made a proposal on this
list to remove the emacspeak support. It's unmaintained and, it seems to
me, unused. The response from you all was almost 100% in favor of
getting rid of it, with many adding that it would be worthwhile to see
hardware synthesizer support added to speech-dispatcher. With respect to
the latter, I wholeheartedly agree: If Orca can talk to
speech-dispatcher and can count on speech-dispatcher to work with
<insert your favorite synthesizer here>, life will be fabulous for all
of us. :)

As you may also recall, in that same thread, Dmitri Paduchikh raised
some concerns specifically to Russian users and asked if I really needed
to remove this support. Because of that, I held off on the removal for
the 3.4 cycle.

We are now starting 3.6 development. Given that in this same thread
Dmitri stated [1]:

DP> Actually, after some thought it appears to me that removing Emacspeak
DP> support wouldn't probably be that harmful for its users as long as you
DP> keep speechserver.SpeechServer interface functioning. One could then
DP> just place modules with Emacspeak support somewhere on sys.path and load
DP> them in his/her orca customizations script.

Based on that, I have gone ahead and removed Orca's Emacspeak support
for Orca master (aka 3.5.x). I have kept speechserver.SpeechServer so
any users impacted by this can do as Dmitri described. Though I
personally would still like to see everything working through
speech-dispatcher. And to be clear: This change will not be made in Orca
3.4, or in the xdesktop-branch, or Orca anything else. It's strictly for
the official Orca branch moving forward towards GNOME 3.6.

Please let me know if you have any questions. And thanks again for your
input on this topic!

Take care.
--joanie

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2012-January/msg00169.html