On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 03:02:13PM +1000, Luke Yelavich wrote:
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.
conversely the fact Orca has only supported speech dispatcher doesn't mean that that's the right choice either. I'm honestly not sure what the best path is.
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.
The espeak synth variants issue is one of the bigger problems with the speech dispatcher model and I'm not really convinced there's a great answer. Speech dispatcher is trying to provide a uniform interface to synthesizers so its clients don't need to care which one they're talking to, but synthesizers all have there own different features, so either speech dispatcher implements some kind of lowest common denominator which isn't great for advanced clients, or speech dispatcher exposes a non uniform interface which kind of means it fails at what its trying to do though it may still be useful enough to be worth having. Trev
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
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