Re: [orca-list] Revamped explanation of problems relating to lack of speech accessability

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

Yeah, there's a lot of fancy multimedia stuff you can't do as nicely without
Pulse.  I don't use those features though so, I don't miss it.  My
overarching concern is that speech output work responsively, reliably and
unceasingly.  When I used pulse, the only time it ever worked decently well
with console, gnome and emacspeak which are the three solutions I use was in
Vinux 3.0  with the systemwide setup Bill Cox came up with for that version
of Vinux.  In 3.1, there was crackling and other issues.  In 3.2, it really
started doing badly for me especially in Emacspeak.  I used Natty (Ubuntu
12.04) also at the time and, as long as I didn't have Gnome logged in, it
worked ok but once I logged onto Gnome, I could forget about console speech
and Emacspeak would start clipping off the end of syllables and just lagging
sometimes.  I had the same issues with Ubuntu 12.10.  Great speech in Gnome,
poor speech performance in the console.  About this time, I switched from
Vinux to Debian.  I worked out how to eliminate Pulse from the equation
during initial installation and all of my stuff just worked way way better.
I never lose speech in the conlsole when Gnome comes up.  My Emacspeak works
as intended.  Gnome works great also.  Perhaps, the multimedia stuff
wouldn't but I just don't do a whole lot of multimedia-related work in
Linux.  I do listen to podcasts and some music from time to time and it
works good.  If I want to turn it down, I reach over and fiddle with the
volume knob on my speakers and that's that.  

Having said all of that, the fact that you guys got console speech working
with Pulse in a secure way gives me hope that it will make it upstream and
other distros like Debian and Fedora as well as plain old Ubuntu will
benefit from it as well.  


Regards,
Alex M

-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Luke
Yelavich
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 12:22 AM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Revamped explanation of problems relating to lack
of speech accessability

On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 01:21:24PM EST, Christopher Chaltain wrote:
> I used two different methods to get Speakup and Orca cohabitating with 
> PulseAudio's user mode in Ubuntu and Vinux before Luke provided his 
> ConsoleKit package. One method was just to log into a console as root 
> and then su to my user ID. Another was to run sudo speechd-up in a 
> terminal on the desktop and then log into my user ID in a console. I 
> don't consider either method to be extremely difficult.
> Your first statement also made it seem like it was not possible as 
> opposed to just difficult.
>
> I've only used PulseAudio systems in the last few years, and I haven't 
> found it that complicated. I don't have experience with a pure alsa 
> system to compare it to though, so you may be right in that I don't 
> know what I'm missing. From the posts I've seen, which I haven't read 
> too deeply, it seems like it takes a bit of work to install a system 
> without PA on it though.
>
> I'm curious, on a pure alsa system, can I control the volume of each 
> audio stream like I can with my Ubuntu systems where I have PA 
> running?

No. Its also harder to do the following:
* Use bluetooth audio hardware.
* Move an application's audio output from one card to another.
* Make an app play through a different card, although if the app provides UI
to do this, then its not so bad.

The resampling algorithm that ALSA's dmix plugin uses is also nowhere nearly
as good a quality as the resamplers that pulseaudio can work with. I say
resamplers because pulseaudio can work with several, and this is changeable
in its configuration files. Pulseaudio also does as much as it can to
minimize power usage when audio is being played back.

Luke
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://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
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to
help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp