Hello and qeustion about SpeakUp

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
You are correct about the software speech output for speakup, it depends
on which synthesiser you want to use as to what software you will need
to get it. If you want to use espeak, then use the espeakup software. If
you have IBMtts (viavoice) then there is a speakup connector for it at
the ttsynth website. If you want to use another synthesiser supported by
speech-dispatcher then you will need speech-dispatcher and speechd-up.
My experience is that you can use any of the above solutions and still
run orca without problems in the graphical console (at the moment I am
using espeak as the synth and espeakup to connect speakup to it and
gnome-speech for connecting orca to espeak).

As for adding speakup to ubuntu, if the kernel version is 2.6.26 or
higher (use uname -r to get this information) then you can build speakup
as modules. I am not quite sure which ubuntu packages you need to have
installed to be able to compile modules hopefully either someone else
will say or may be you know. You will then need to get speakup from git
or some recent copy of speakup (slackware has some snapshots of the git
repository on their ftp server
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/source/k/).
Hopefully in that there will be sufficient information to tell you how
to perform the actual compilation of speakup as modules and how to
install it.

Sorry I can't be more detailed about how to install speakup on ubuntu,
this is partly because I don't use ubuntu and I am so used to compiling
speakup into the actual kernel rather than compiling it as modules.

There are some additional things to consider. Ubuntu uses pulseaudio. I
feel ubuntu deals with pulseaudio in the wrong manner, sound is a system
resource and if pulseaudio is meant to be the way to access audio
devices then it should be treated as a system service, they seem to
think it is a gnome service. The short of this is that whatever output
software you choose for speakup will have to deal with pulseaudio
running when you have a gnome session running and also cope with
pulseaudio not running when there is no active gnome-session. You may
(if you haven't) want to look at removing pulseaudio. You may want to
look at other distros (like debian or GRML) which don't impose
pulseaudio on you (GRML might be of particular interest as that has
speakup and software speech output already configured).

One final comment is that you asked whether the entire system will be
accessible, this depends what you mean. Using software speech means you
will not be able to gain any speech output until the audio system is
running properly, on a correctly configured system getting to a point
where software speech output can run should not be a problem, but if you
are the sort wanting to compile custom kernels then you might get
earlier problems. Like wise on the shutdown process you will only keep
speech output until the connector software is killed. Again no real
problems should occur after that on a properly configured system, but
rare things might happen particularly if you fiddle with some of the
core components and make a mistake. So basically if you aren't going to
mess with things like the kernel you should have access to all you need
access to, but if you are going to delve into things like compiling
custom kernels you may get problems outside where software speech can
run.

Michael Whapples
On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 08:27 +0000, James & Nash wrote:
> Hello. My name is James and I have just joined ths list. I hope I will learn 
> a lot and hopefully contribute in time.
> 
> Am I correct in thinking that there is a software synthesizer for Speak UP 
> and that you can have both Speak Up and Orca running on the same system? If 
> so, how would I go about installing Speak Up in Ubuntu and does this mean 
> that I could have speech at start up and in every part of Linux with both 
> Screen Readers?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> James 
> 
> 
>