Hello and qeustion about SpeakUp

[James & Nash]

Thank you Michael, you've been very helpful.Nice to see you on this list as 
well as the Orca list.

Take care

james
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Whapples" <mwhapples at aim.com>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 10:21 PM
Subject: Re: Hello and qeustion about SpeakUp


> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
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