I installed the Voxin speech synthesizer. Although this worked fairly nicely with the default install of Ubuntu 9.04, there was no way to stop the Voxin synthesizer from speaking when large amounts of info were displayed to the screen in a gnome-terminal session. Apparently there was some strange interaction between the gnome-speech system and the Voxin synthesizer. Sometimes it would go on talking for several minutes and would not let the user type anything into the terminal or switch to another application.
To fix this, I had to remove pulseaudio and configure speech-dispatcher (which was a bit tricky since I have several audio devices). Also, even speech-dispatcher wouldn't work with the default setup. Working with the people at Oralux (who provide Voxin), they figured out that the problem could be solved by putting a 15 second delay into the /etc/speech-dispatcher/speech.conf file so that speech-dispatcher didn't load immediately upon login. I don't know why this made a difference, but it turned out to be the key to getting speech-dispatcher with Voxin to work. So, although great strides have been made in Linux accessibility over the years, this certainly isn't a turnkey process yet and there is a way to go. --Pete From: Bill Cox <[email protected]> Subject: Re: ubuntu 9.04 accessibility To: Guy Schlosser <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 I also have managed to get a fairly stable version of Ubuntu 9.04 x64, but I followed a different route. I didn't have to un-install or stop using any major package, including pulseaudio, compiz, and Gnome Speech Services. I don't need speech-dispatcher. Basically, I updated to the bleeding-edge version of several packages, as described at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/UbuntuJaunty#preview However, I do not recommend blind/VI users follow this bleeding-edge approach. Your approach has less risk. It's nice to see, though, that better accessibility is coming down the pipe. Bill -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
