Re: [orca-list] an important regression: amazing slowness when opening the voice list in orca if espeak varients are enabled

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

Firstly Kendell, please please please consider breaking your text up into paragraphs, as it makes it much 
much easier to reply to.

On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 05:21:41PM AEST, kendell clark wrote:
> hi all
> as of around seven o'clock today, a new speech-dispatcher release was
> released, v0.8.3. It adds support for espeak varients, finally. This
> option is disabled by default in the config file. If it is enabled,
> you can now use espeak varients, which are espeak's term for
> differently sounding voices. Now that I've gotten that out of the way,
> there is a huge, huge lag when attempting to open the orca preferences
> dialog when this option is enabled. I can often get to the voice list,
> but after I open the list, the dialog becomes completely unresponsive

This is why it is only a temporary solution, and why it is off by default. There are over 1000 entries in 
that list now, thanks to all the voices with all variant combinations. Unfortunately it is not possible to 
type ahead in the list to get to what you want.

Another work-around is to use the command-line spd-say utility to look through the voice and variant 
combinations, and then hand-edit your Orca config file. Use something like "spd-say --list-synthesis-voices 
-o espeak > espeak-voices.txt"

You would still be able to use the variant, even with the configuration option turned off, as the 
configuration option only affects the listing of voices and variants, not the usage of them. So you could 
generate a file to use as reference as above, then turn the variants option off and restart Speech 
Dispatcher, and then edit Orca configs accordingly.

This is of course only if you are confident hand editing configuration files.

Given the above issue, getting an APi added to allow Orca to use espeak variants is on the priority list, 
however things have to be done such that the mechanism that is put in place will allow any such synth to 
provide optional extras should we wish to do so. Of course this will also require additions to the orca UI.

Luke