Hi, I believe Rhythmbox and Totem both use ALSA to talk to the sound hardware on your machine. ALSA has the nice capability of mixing multiple streams of audio across applications. On the other hand, most (if not all) speech synthesizers use the older OSS sound library to talk to your sound card. A conflict occurs when an app using OSS and another using ALSA try to send output to the same device. Typically, one will block indefinitely until the other releases the device.
SpeechDispatcher is looking to address this problem by routing output from OSS synthesizers through ALSA when possible. For instance, IBM TTS (ViaVoice) can return the raw speech waveform to an application instead of outputing it directly. An app can do whatever it wants with the waveform (e.g. send it to ALSA). I'm not sure how mature this support is in SpeechDispatcher at present. LSR 0.3.0 has support for routing IBM TTS speech through a free, but closed source third-party mixing library that output using ALSA. Directions on how to configure LSR to use this library will be available when 0.3.0 is released at the end of the month. Pete -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
