Re: [orca-list] Doing it wrong

[Jeffery Mewtamer <mewtamer gmail com>]

Okay, I'm going to attempt to clear up a few things:

espeak and espeak-ng are both text-to-speech engines. I'm not sure
what the difference between them is beyond espeak being the legacy
version and espeak-ng being the newer version(the ng stands for "next
generation"), but as Orca requires a TTS to produce sound and most
distros default to one of these, chances are good you're already using
one or the other under the hood with Orca.

Speakup is a kernel module that provides screen reader functionality
in the Linux console, and has no use when running a graphical desktop
environment, So unless you are using ctrl+alt+F2 to break out of the
GUI and log into a text-only user session or your system doesn't
launch the GUI at boot and you use startx to get into the GUI, you
probably aren't in a position to utilize it. That said, like Orca, it
requires a TTS to produce speech, with the most common options to be
to use either espeakup to connect speakup with espeak/espeak-ng or
speechdup to connect it to Speech-Dispatcher(not a TTS itself, but a
speech server that facilitates connecting to various TTS engines).

And at the most basic level, the main advantage of installing
additional TTS engines is to have additional voices to work with, and
if a screen reader is your primary use case for TTS, that's probably
about all you'll notice.