Hi Kenny, I've since installed a Debian lenny distro (as you know from IRC) and upgraded it to sid. This is on a "real" machine, not a VM. Here are my observations/comments:
Kenny Hitt wrote: >> First, I could not get the demon to start after I had installed SD. I >> actually had to reboot the system. >> > Never seen that issue, but I run all Debian boxes now days. My recent tests > with Ubuntu Hardy did have problems, but they could > be fixed by removing a file specific to the Ubuntu speech-dispatcher package. > I still had to reboot my Debian distro after installing Speech-Dispatcher. Even though spd-say was available and appeared to work, no speech came out until I actually rebooted. >> Second, after reboot was finished, Gnome-Speech, which was still >> configured as Orca's main speech server, was completely gone. There was >> no speech, and since I didn't have a braille display, I was left >> completely in the dark. I had to "blindly" start gnome-terminal, delete >> my .orca settings folder, and shutdown and re-run Orca from the command >> line to choose SD from the text-based initial setup >> > That was because Ubuntu uses portaudio 18 for espeak. This means espeak uses > OSS for output instead of ALSA. That issue doesn't happen > on Debian because it uses portaudio 19 for espeak. It will happen with any > other gnome-speech synths since all the other ones use OSS. > Right, this problem no longer existed on Debian. >> Third, after I had it up and running, I found that often, two chunks of >> stuff to be spoken would overlap, especially when Orca was speaking >> something and I was using the keyboard to either type in something or >> navigate. For example: I was going through the Orca Preferences dialog. >> I had Key Echo set to Characters, and everytime I hit TAB to go to the >> next control, it would take over half a second before Orca stopped >> speaking the previous control that I was not interested in. Within that >> half second, on a second audio channel, it would speak the fact that I >> had pressed TAB. So I had both an overlap in speech output coming from >> the SAME product, and a delay in the speech synth shutting up speaking >> the control I was not interested in. To me, this is unnerving, if not >> even unacceptable behaviour. If I press something like the TAB or an >> arrow key, I want the speech engine to shut up immediately and speak the >> new chunk of information relevant to me, and not think about whether it >> should stop speaking and pick up the new chunk at its own leisure >> > The overlap is a side effect of dmix. I notice it, but it isn't as long here > as what you experience. > This is also much much better on the "real" box. Makes me believe that the TCP/IP traffic going back and forth between Orca and SD may have been influenced by the fact that this was running inside a VM, where the network adapters are all emulated and managed by the host operating system/virtualization software. > I agree there are still issues to be resolved with speech-dispatcher, but the > added features of speech-dispatcher over gnome-speech will eventually make > Orca better once it switches to speech-dispatcher and the problems are fixed. > I agree with this. But again, now that I am actually running it on a real box, SD leaves a much better impression with me than initially. Marco _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
