Hi list, Some updates about my questions concerning Gnome accessibility under VmWare Server: I read on the Web that disabling Gnome system sounds might help as there might be some conflict between the app managing them and Gnome-Speech. I did that and after some rebooting Gnopernicus appears to speak. The audio artifacts that prevent me from using Festival in VmWare still remain, however.
As a temporary solution I'm thinking of sending stuff to the virtual machine's serial port which is a named pipe to a Perl script driving a speech synth in Windows. Now the question is how do I get speech commands in the COM port in Gnopernicus? I read somewhere it uses speech dispatcher which includes a generic APi for command-line driven speech synths. So supposedly changing my speech synth to some echo commands to dev/ttyS1 would do the trick. But as I'm new to Linux and Speech Dispatcher in particular, how to do that? I found a sample speech dispatcher config at: http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2006-April/038667.html Extrapolating from that I'm going to try something like the following. Does this look OK? GenericExecuteSynth "echo \"$RATE $VOLUME $DATA\" >dev/ttyS1" AddVoice "en" "generic" "en" GenericLanguage "en" "english" I'm thinking of supporting speed and volume but other than that I'd be very happy to get even a single SAPI 5 voice speaking this way, as a proof of concept. Step by step instructions as to where in Ubuntu speech dispatcher config files go, how they should be named and so on would be appreciated. I can use the console via my WIndows terminal emu but am not very comfortable with it. That is I have annoying buffering issues with my virtual serial port and auto-completion does nothing. But these are windows issues. Additionally, i found that I don't seem to be able to get super user privileges with su. However, if I use GNome and then enter the same password as for my ordinary user account, apps like Synaptic let me in without complaints. Odd. It's probably me missing some Ubuntu fundamentals again. BTW: I've read the Ubuntu Accessibility Wiki. Frankly speaking, currently Gnome is a pain to use with full-screen magnification alone. I'm primarily a speech user as I said but have a bit of a hen and egg situation in the sense that it's hard to do proper troubleshooting or read manuals off-line before the access aids are working. Well hope someone can help me with this. This time I haven't got so many questions and the mail isn't awfully long either. -- With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
