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Re: [orca-list] audio infrastructure for assistive software?

Adding on a bit to what Didier says:

Who is your target audience here? Have you actually identified a group that would benefit from this?

Speaking for myself, I'm done with VirtualBox. I used to run it exclusively. Then I set up a Windows VM under 
Virt-Manager and haven't looked back. VirtualBox's audio support was so terrible and laggy. Qemu was 
comparatively blazing. I've even been able to do light audio editing, including near-real-time MIDI playback, 
by using USB devices hosted by the Windows guest, which thanks to passthrough was as easy as plugging in the 
device once the VM was booted. I think things may have gotten even better with the release of Qemu 4.0 and 
some unofficial pulseaudio patchset Reddit was having kittens over for months until it finally got upstreamed.

I know you can't use Qemu and be easily cross-platform, which is my point. Why create a Linux VM on a virtualization 
technology with such bad audio? What group are you targeting who will download and get use out of such a thing? I'm 
genuinely not being sarcastic--I'm trying to understand what problem this solves or what group it helps. And why would 
I want a bunch of software I won't need, when I can get the software I do need as easily as typing 
"dnf/flatpak/snap/brew install ..."?

On 1/24/20 6:10 PM, Didier Spaier via orca-list wrote:

Hello Rich,

I couldn't find where to download Perkify on your website. is a
pre-version already available?

Now, let me be blunt in the hope to help.

I think you need to really use the a11y software and integrate them so
that Perkify can have a real added value. To provide an actually
accessible system, a good integration of the shipped software is a must.
In other words, just shipping a lot of software a11y related is not
enough: they should be configured to play well together. As an example,
even if Debian ships all that's needed wrt accessibility, as far as know
it is still not configured by default in such a way that you can keep
speech switching from a graphical environment to a console.

The right question about ALSA and PulseAudio is rather "how do I
configure them so that they play well together" rather than "which one
should be preferred."

Also, the process to get Perkify working looks to complicated to me as
it involves Perkify itself (indeed) as well as Vagrant and and a
pecific version of VirtualBox (which is not the best choice wrt a11y in
my opinion as the sound support is not in par with that of Qemu).

If I understand well Perkify is an Image for VirtuslBox, and is huge
(10G?) Here is what I suggest, technically speaking:
1. Provide an image of the installed system for Qemu, compressed.
2. Install in it a minimum system: just what is needed to be accessible
with Braille and speak and include the utilities and instructions needed
to download and install all other packages. Indeed downloading the
packages will take some time, but I think that's more acceptable than
downloading a very big image for people with a slow and possibly
unreliable Internet connection.
3. Provide instructions to install Qemu and a small shell script to set
up a VM with Perkify in it.

I have done something like that for Slint recently: the compressed image
weighs only 302M. This stuff is in:
http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-14.2.1/minislint/
cf.: the README there.

HTH and good luck,

Didier

Le 24/01/20 à 22:35, Rich Morin a écrit :

I've been making significant progress on getting audio output to work from Perkify
(my attempt at a blind-friendly VM, based on Ubuntu, Vagrant, and Virtualbox) to
macOS.  The plan is to have it work with Linux and Windows hosts, as well.  The
current setup only uses ALSA and PulseAudio, but I'm planning to add JACK to the
mix <g>, by means of the pulseaudio-module-jack package.

I've installed a number of audio-related accessibility packages, including BRLTTY,
Fenrir, Orca, etc.  I'd also like to support Emacspeak, the vOICE, and others.  So,
I'd like to know if there are any common themes in how these sorts of packages use
audio output.  For example, do they generally tend to use ALSA and PulseAudio?

Feel free to contact me off-list or on the Perkify mailing list (perkify.groups.io)
if your response seems to be veering too far off-topic for this group.  I'm also
interested in finding folks who would like to help by testing and/or configuring
these sorts of packages.

-r

P.S.  For more information on Perkify, visit its Introduction page:
       http://pa.cfcl.com/item?key=Areas/Content/Overviews/Perkify_Intro/main.toml

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