Re: [orca-list] sound through pulse audio running as root may soon be fixed

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com> wrote:
 
> Dave mielke  has agreed to work with both me and the PA people to fix
> this issue. If this bug can get fixed and I'm going to do all that I can
> to make sure it does, this will likely fix a lot more than just brltty.
> It will fix speakup's inability to work with pulse audio because it's
> run as root. The reason I'm making such a big deal of this is because
> this has been an embarrassing issue for all of us linux accessibility
> advocates being unable to fix an issue any windows user would
> immediately point out as a showstopper even if they had no idea what
> speakup was or what it did.

And not just the Windows users - Mac OS X, iOS, Android and Chrome OS users
would find the presence of these problems astonishing. To my mind, they're
unacceptable, and they demonstrate a lack of good collaboration in the Linux
community to design a reliable audio system that can meet the needs of all its
users, including those who run screen readers.

Luke Yelavich has discussed plans for addressing these concerns on previous
occasions. Unfortunately, he seems to be the only person actively working on
them, and his availability is limited, for good reasons (i.e., I'm sure it's a
case of too many projects and too little time).

We need a few more people with audio programming expertise to join him in
solving these problems, as well as some agreement among Linux audio developers
on the plan for doing so.

On the positive side, PulseAudio has a feature which no other operating system
that I have tried can match (at least without installing special software).
You can adjust the output volume of each application individually, and you can
also move audio input or output at any time to a different device, again (and
this is the key differentiator) separately for each application. This is very
useful indeed for those of us who have two or more audio devices.

PulseAudio also supports network-based sound transmission, which is
potentially beneficial for people who need to run Orca on remote systems. (It
may also be possible to provide remote access to braille displays using Brlapi
and network sockets).