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

A way around this might be a three-pronged solution by means of 
installation of the type of system to be used.  If someone intends to 
use a primarily graphical interface nothing need be done when they make 
that choice during installation of debian at least.  For the other 
systems that don't offer the other possible solutions I'm about to write 
about here, this message is not for you.  A second solution would be an 
alsa-only primarily console solution in which aptitude had certain 
configuration adjustments made to its files during installation.  A 
third solution might be a bleeding edge console test bed for alsa and 
pulse in which certain adjustments got made to /etc/apt/sources.list so 
that the latest stuff from pulse got downloaded onto the machine and 
that user could go in contact with the freedesktop people and it would 
be understood by the freedesktop people that this person when reporting 
bugs is primarily targeting pulse audio console bugs.  I'm pretty sure 
the problems with pulse audio need a  solution at this level since I 
think they're going to be long-term problems.  I could be wrong about 
that and I'd be very happy to be wrong about that, but somehow I don't 
think I'm going to be happy for a while.

On Tue, 6 Aug 2013, Christopher Chaltain wrote:


OK, fair enough. I guess what one considers jumping through a bunch of hoops
is subjective.

On 08/06/2013 10:23 AM, Alex Midence wrote:

Did that.  I recompiled espeak to use pulse by editing the makefile
accordingly.  Still had issues.  That did wonders for Emacspeak, for
instance.  It still gave me pure golden silence the minute I logged into
Gnome though.  That's not portaudio.  That's pure pulse.  Clever solution I
read some people were doing was logging into console with a different user
name.  By then, I was already using pulse-free Debian and didn't need to do
that but, it reinforces my point that you have to jump through a bunch of
hoops to get Pulse to do the sort of things I need it to do.  Those hoops
are nonexistent with it out of the equation.

Alex M




-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of
Christopher Chaltain
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 9:27 AM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Revamped explanation of problems relating to lack
of speech accessability

I had some of the problems you described in the console prior to the release
of vinux 4, and I was able to resolve them by recompiling eSpeak to use
PulseAudio instead of PortAudio when PulseAudio is installed.
It's true I had to recompile eSpeak to fix the issues with lag and dropping
syllables, but the fact that I did it by taking PortAudio out of the
equation tells me that PulseAudio shouldn't be blamed for this behavior. I
believe this is how eSpeak is built for Vinux 4 now, i.e.
using the runtime option instead of PortAudio, which is why these problems
don't exist in Vinux 4 using PulseAudio.

On 08/06/2013 09:20 AM, Alex Midence wrote:

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

_______________________________________________
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



--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail
_______________________________________________
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






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