Re: [orca-list] Espeak

[Jeffery Mewtamer <mewtamer gmail com>]

Okay, one important distinction it sounds like you might be missing is
that a screen reader and a speech synthesizer are two different pieces
of technology, though a screen reader generally requires a speech
synthesizer.

espeak and espeak-ng are examples of speech synthesizers. Orca and
Fenrir are examples of screen readers. Either of these screen readers
can use espeak or espeak-ng to produce speech or use a different
speech synthesizer altogether.

Many distros that offer the option of having a screen reader setup at
installation default to either espeak or espeak-ng for synthesizing
speech, but there are other options for most screen readers, and many
setups use Speech Dispatcher as a bridge between the screen reader and
the speech synthesizer.

As for Consoles and Terminals, Most flavors of Linux give you the
option to either run a GUI like you'd find on Windows orOSX or a
text-only, command-line driven console similar to an old DOS machine.
However, Terminal Emulators exist to let you use the command line and
text-only applications from within the GUI.

Orca is exclusively a GUI Screen Reader and as far as I know, is the
only graphical screen reader of note for Linux. There are several
options for screen reading on text-only setups, but as far as I know,
the most widely used are to use the SpeakUp Kernel module using either
espeakup(bridging SpeakUp with espeak or espeak-ng) or
speechdup(bridging SpeakUp with Speech-Dispatcher) or using Fenrir. As
a general rule, console screen readers are useless in the GUI, though
Fenrir can be used either without a GUI or within a terminal emulator
under a GUI... and while Orca deos work in a terminal emulator, some
terminal emulators work better with Orca than others.

It can be rather confusing in this area because usually one is working
withh several components instead of a monolithic piece of software,
and many of the most common options for each component have similar
sounding names that are easy to get mixed up if you're not careful,
but I hope this helps untangle the accessibility stack a bit.