Bug: speech stops when reading long documents

[Tony Baechler]

Hello all,

As I previously announced here, I compiled Debian 2.6.24 kernel packages 
with Speakup 3.0.2 included.  I am using the DEC-talk Express.  The 
/sys/module/speakup/parameters/version says that it is version 1.9 of 
the driver.

I've noticed what I think is a bug, but I'm not sure if it's in the 
kernel or in Speakup itself.  It didn't have this problem before so I 
think it's Speakup, but the Shane Etch install CD showed the same 
behavior with an older version of Speakup from CVS so I'm not sure.  
What's happening is that when I read a long document such as a README, 
speech will abruptly stop in the middle of a word.  Often I'll hear 
"sla" instead of slash and that's the last thing spoken, as though I 
tapped the keypad Enter to stop speech even though I didn't.  If I press 
the Speakup keys to read anything, nothing happens.  If I type commands, 
still nothing happens for a few characters.  The only things that 
restore speech are hitting the Enter keypad key to clear the buffer or 
to start typing characters until speech comes back on its own, usually 
after about four letters.

Is this a kernel problem or something in Speakup?  Should I be changing 
something in the kernel configuration?  If I just read a screen of text 
at a time, no problem.  If I send a large amount of text to the 
synthesizer such as with cat, speech stops.  Could this be a buffering 
problem?

I had a doubletalk LT which used to do the same thing after 32 KB of 
text, but that was a problem in the unit itself and wasn't used with 
Speakup.  That's why I'm thinking it has to do with buffering.  I'll be 
happy to do more tests to track down this bug as it makes it difficult 
to read large amounts of text.  Even simple commands such as "dpkg -L 
base-files" will cause the problem.