Re: [orca-list] Solving screenreader sound problems in presence of sound servers once and for all

[Chris Brannon <chris the-brannons com>]

Michał Zegan <webczat_200 poczta onet pl> writes:

> This I don't get, at least not fully.
> What is a problem with spawning per user services without something like
> starting things with nohup?

In 21 years of Linux experience, I have used nohup about 5 times, all of
them as a method of last resort.  When services are not managed by an
init system of some kind, they aren't guaranteed to be reliable and
always ready to use.

As for going against the grain of Unix, consider one of my machines that
is mostly used headless but which does have console access.  It has some
speakers hooked up to it, and I typically log in to it over ssh and play
audio to the room.  I don't want my audio stream dying just because I
decided to close my ssh session.  A Unix system should well be able to
do things on my behalf without me being logged in.

> and although system wide sound server would work, things
> like me just remoting to my machine and needing a gui are so hard to
> imagine? It's definitely possible to do it somehow, but I don't know any
> solution that just works with sound support, at least for now. Maybe one
> exists...

I do that.  I've been known to run browsers in virtual machines for
security and privacy.  X is network transparent; it can be tunneled over
ssh too.  Pulseaudio is network transparent.  Speech Dispatcher is
network transparent, though I'd suggest that most of the time the best
approach is to forward its Unix-domain socket over an ssh connection
(yeah you can do that).

> And note multiuser also covers one user at a time, but different than
> the main user, and I was definitely doing that. Like your pc is
> temporarily being used by some sighted folks. And they decide to mute
> the sound.

Do they really need audio access?  If not, then leave them out of the
appropriate groups.  On my system those would be pulse-access and
audio.  If they do need audio and they're doinking with it, then map a
custom key to reset the audio config and unmute the audio.  This is
Linux, the world is your oyster.

> and what uses the hardware? I mean, don't you need apps at the server
> side to connect to the sound server on the thin client? How do you
> config that?

See above; pulseaudio and Speech Dispatcher are both
network-transparent.  All of the thin clients I've encountered lacked
audio hardware, but there's no reason they couldn't have it nowadays.
Especially if they support USB.

> Especially on wayland world. Yes I know wayland has
> accessibility problems at the moment.

There is waypipe for network transparency.  If wayland becomes widely
adopted, this kind of thing is going to be made to work, because there
are a lot of us out there that make use of network transparency.

-- Chris

--
Chris Brannon
Founder: Blind and Low Vision Unix Users Group (https://blvuug.org/).
Personal website: (https://the-brannons.com/)
Chat: IRC: teiresias on freenode, XMPP: chris chat number89 net