several things I don't understand and need for Speakup-HOWTO

[Kirk Reiser]

Thomas Stivers <stivers_t at tomass.dyndns.org> writes:

> Hi all. There are several small things I don't quite understand and I
> would like to explain them in my speakup howto (you know the one I have
> been talking about for some time but still been to lazy to finish).
> 
> First there are several items in /proc/speakup that I don't really get.
> These are cursor_time, delay_time, ex_num, full_time,jiffy_delta, punct,
> say_control, say_word_ctl, and trigger_time. Some explanation on some or

Let's see if I can help with a few of these:

cursor_time - the amount of time in milliseconds from the time the
cursor moves to the speaking of the line/character/whatever.  A value
of 120 means that on a down arrow the line will be spoken 120 ms after
the key has been hit.

puncht - Chuck already pointed out is the hardware synths punctuation
level which we set so we can provide our own version of punctuation
and number processing and the like.

This next group of four are related to synthesizer and speakup control
times and are critical for smooth or choppy behaviour.

full_time - the amount of time in milliseconds to sleep when a synth
announces it's buffer is full before trying to send the synth more
data.

trigger_time - is the time in milliseconds between when the last
character was received and when we should send buffered data to the
synth.  If it is to large you will get sluggish responsiveness when
typing or partial line prompts show up and the like.
If this is to low then you will hear characters and partial words
instead of complete words and lines on output from the computer.

delay_time - is the time in milliseconds between speakup sending data
to the synth.  So it sends data and then goes to sleep for delay_time
ms.  If this is to large you will get choppy output because the synth
will finish before new material is sent to it.  If it is to low once
again you will get partial words and lines because not enough new
material has come in before speaking.

jiffy_delta - the amount of time we allow ourselves to hold the
processor when sending data to the synth.  When we have the processor
nobody else can have it so if we hold it to long then all processes
get delayed and the whole system becomes unresponsive.

Tuning the above values to maintain good responsiveness and smooth
speech output can be very easy with some synths and a real pain with
others.  The dectalk family for instance has some very long command
strings so if you don't have the values set correctly you only get
partial command seequences sent out before we go to sleep and the
synth times out itself.

The other controls I will have to look up myself because I don't
remember what they all do off hand myself.

  Kirk

-- 

Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061