Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 01:48:04PM AEST, Storm Dragon wrote:
> Howdy,
> Nearly every other screen reader has multiple ways to interact with speech. NVDA has a built in espeak, and 
> the other nonfree readers have synths as well, I think most have a built in Eloquence. Never once, have I 
> heard any of those users complain that their screen reader has entirely too many ways to talk. Also, as far 
> as I am aware, no one has ever said "Man, I really wish my screen reader had to jump through layer after 
> layer of junk to speak."

Just because other screen readers interface directly with a speech synthesizer doesn't mean Orca should. Orca 
certainly has the modularity to allow for different speech systems to be supported, including a direct eSpeak 
driver, but given speech-dispatcher is the only TTS backend supported, that may very well change in the 
future.

> Speech-dispatcher is ok, for minimal usage, but it crashes with alsa, has
> odd puctuation inconsistancies, and is slow as molasses. The last time
> development of speech-dispatcher even reached a snail's pace was when
> open-speech or whatever was called was made because people weree frustrated
> with the lack of progress made by speech-dispatcher. I'm not even asking to
> replace spd. Let the people who like it use it. That's one thing that makes
> Linux rock, there's usually more than one way to do things. for some people,
> speech-dispatcher may be fine. for me, it's falling rather short.

Yes, speech-dispatcher has some annoying issues that need attentionnnnnn. Nobody is denying that, not even 
me. There are many things that niggle me about speech-dispatcher too. However I have not yet been able to 
find the time and desire to want to sit down and try and fix them. Perhaps since there are issues with 
speech-dispatcher that really annoy you, you could consider getting involved and help properly identify sed 
issues, and maybe even fix them.

> Also, with a reliable way to deliver speech, speech-dispatcher can drag on it its currently abysmally slow 
> progress, and we can have fully working espeak. Speech-dispatcher has been around and for a long time now, 
> and there still not full support for espeak... No way to use variants, and you have to hack it to use 
> freasonably fast espeak.

The only reason speech-dispatcher's development progress is abysmally slow is because people cannot currently 
find the time to work on it.

For those of you who want a direct eSpeak orca driver, you will probably have to find someone to write the 
driver, probably someone who wants the same thing as you do. I am sure Joanie could, but I think she has her 
hands full with more time consuming stuff, such as keeping up with GNOME's developments, and keeping up with 
the ever changing nature of the web and ensuring users have a sane browsing experience with Firefox.

As for speech-dispatcher, the issues you have raised are well known, and need to be addressed. When time 
allows, either myself or someone else will work on fixing Speech-dispatcher not supporting eSpeak synth 
variants, and fixing the ALSA driver. Given I work on speech-dispatcher in my spare time, and given I also 
have a life and interests outside of my full time job, I can give no ETA as to when these issues will be 
addressed.

Luke