Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller

From: kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>
To: mike raspberryvi org, orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 17:25:06 -0600

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

hi
I thought this thread was dead. i'm glad it's not. Ideally what I'd
like to do is either a, load orca's config file, parse it to get the
speech rate, pitch, synth, voice, etc and direct either orca or
speech-dispatcher to speak using those parameters. Or b, use whatever
pidgin uses to cause orca to speak. Pidgin almost never fails to speak
unless I have it set not to, or if I have speech turned off. Going
through orca seems the more direct way, because I could then call
orca.braille(message) or whatever it is. But if I import any modules
of orca while orca is running, orca freezes until they're unloaded,
giving orca control over them again. I stand by what I said before. I
think this would be useful in certain circumstances, not all. Mud
clients would be a particularly good one. I need to see how pidgin
makes orca speak, and presumably braille as well. I'm not sure on this
one because I don't have a braille display. But if orca speaks, and
brailles, whatever at-spi gives it, then speaking through at spi would
bypass orca entirely, but still give me what I want.


Thanks
Kendell clark

Mike Ray wrote:

Hello,

I too have not read back over the entirety of this thread but, it
seems to me that what is required does not necessarily need to
involve Orca at all.

It would be very easy to write a shared library which can be linked
into any application and which provides the same kind of functions
as the aforementioned 'NVDA Controller Client'.

The NVDA CC provides basically three functions:

* Is NVDA running? * Speak string * Braille string

A shared library that directly links to eSpeak and which will do
the following is easy:

* Speak, potentially interpreting embedded SSML

Not sure if the same level of API access exists in brltty.

Because of the ability of eSpeak to handle SSML it would be
possible, for example, to get applications that are calling it to
speak in a different voice to the one currently selected in Orca.
So, for example, a MUDD client could speak in one voice while Orca
is speaking in the other.

While this is a trivial job, like the NVDA Controller-Client, 
applications which use it will have to specifically be written or 
altered to use it.

I have briefly looked at the at-spi code and it is a forest.  Hard
to get a handle on, but it's my guess that calling it to get it to
speak (via Orca) probably isn't that hard.

An easier way of going back over previous utterances in a MUDD
client might be to open it in a shell inside Emacspeak(?)  Question
mark because neither have I used shells inside Emacspeak very much,
and my dalliance with MUDD didn't last 24 hours before my attention
span exploded :)

Mike



On 12/12/2014 13:23, Christopher Chaltain wrote:

I haven't been paying too much attention to this thread, and it's
been a while since I pulled up Pidgin, but isn't there something
implemented already that allows Pidgin to do this with Orca?

On 12/11/2014 01:54 PM, kendell clark wrote: hi Nods, what storm
said. I originally came up with this idea because of the tintin
sound pack for alter aeon, but it might be useful for otehr apps
too. It's not a substitute for proper accessibility, but let me 
try and elaborate a bit. I read lots of books, and when I'm in
firefox reading a book and a tell on alter aeon comes in, I get a
sound letting me know it. I then have to alt tab back to
alteraeon window, which isn't hard. But due to alt tab issues in
mate this is sometimes slow, but it always works. I press the key
combination to replay back the last tell to me. WHich, because of
terminal emulator issues in orca it's not always read. If this
were implemented, orca would just interrupt itself with the tell,
email, whatever, and then continue reading. Saves me time and,
tbh, is just plain convenient. Thanks Kendell clark


Alex Midence wrote:

You'd have to build a Say function into the Orca code and a
display function for the braille that allows you to pass
arguments to it then.  You would then need to find a way to
get at the notification text.  Something like:

while MessageText = true { Say (MessageTextContents);
Display (MessageTextContents); }

The hardest part will be filling the MessageText and 
MessageTextContents variables.  This is where an api would
come in handy or you can OCR the text on the screen I guess
and then have the OCR engine return the results.  Probably
want a container for them like a vector so you can hold
multiple values in some sort of a history.  Probably want
some sort of timer for how long the message appears on the
braille display function too.   Again, this is pure
conjecture on my part.  Just doing some brainstorming. 
You'll probably get suggestions a thousand times better
from more accomplished and experienced coders than your
humble servant.

Hth, Alex M

-----Original Message----- From: orca-list 
[mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Storm
Dragon Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2014 12:38 PM To:
Orca-list Subject: Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an
NVDA like controller

Hi, The reasons for being able to send stuff through orca
itself is that people have their speech set the way the
like it, and presenting info this way would use those
settings. usually if you send stuff through spd itself, you
get that slow laggy speech that's also probably in a
different accent or language than they may want. Also, some
people may be using braille instead of speech, and orca
could present the info in their chosen medium, where as spd
is limited to speech only. finally, this seems to be a
standard feature in pretty much every other screen reader
ever made. I would personally like a command line flag to
do the same thing, instead of an api, so that scripts could
easily present things with Orca as well, e.g: orca
--present-text "hello world" would cause Orca to say "hello
world". On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 12:31:20PM -0600, Alex 
Midence wrote:

Hmmh, how about a system call to spd-say to make some
text be spoken.  You would be bypassing Orca altogether
and using Speech-dispatcher.  I don't know Python but,
here is some pseudocode for what I mean:

String notification; Function TalkToMe (Notification) { 
System(spd-say 'notification'); }

Admittedly, it's influenced by my smattering of c++ but, 
hopefully, you get the picture. Hope this makes sense,
Alex M


-----Original Message----- From: orca-list 
[mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of
Joanmarie Diggs Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2014 6:52 AM
To: Halim sahin; orca-list gnome org Subject: Re:
[orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller

On 12/11/2014 11:24 AM, Halim sahin wrote:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2014-June/msg01039.html

Afaik this functionality allowed other apps to use orca for speech

output.


Actually that code was not implemented, let alone being
called. So even if it were not removed, other apps could
not use Orca for speech output.

Having said that, Orca is a screen reader; not an app
that others can use to make their app speak whatever they
want. So if the functionality being proposed is
screen-reader functionality, it should be included in
Orca. If the functionality is not screen-reader
functionality, then Orca should not be used to provide
it. If the latter is the case, and the problem is just 
wanting consistent voice settings, Orca can expose those
speech settings.

Hope this helps. --joanie 
_______________________________________________ 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


-- Powered by Arch Linux! I am registered Linux user number
508465: https://linuxcounter.net/user/508465.html My blog,
Thoughts of a Dragon: http://www.stormdragon.tk/ get my
public PGP key: gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key
43DDC193 Follow me on Pump.io:
http://microca.st/stormdragon2976 "They called me the 
leather apron, they called me Smiling Jack. Then they
prayed to the heavens above that I will never ever come
back" Lordi - Blood Red Sandman
_______________________________________________ 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

_______________________________________________ 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

References:
- [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: kendell clark
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: Halim sahin
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: Joanmarie Diggs
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: Alex Midence
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: Storm Dragon
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: Alex Midence
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: kendell clark
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: Christopher Chaltain
- Re: [orca-list] beginning work on an NVDA like controller
  - From: Mike Ray

[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]