Hello and qeustion about SpeakUp

[al Sten-Clanton]

Hi, Michael!

First, I compliment you on the quality of the messages you've sent earlier
on this matter.  It is quite refreshing to see messages that are more than a
sentence or a fragment of information, since for those of us who are not in
the know, these are sometimes unhelpful or worse.

Second, do you know of any documentation that is genuinely good about using
espeakup?  I have so far been unable to find anything telling me either (a)
how it works with software speech or (b) where to find that out.  My recent
kernel-building disaster has jacked up my impatience with fragmentary
documentation, so anything you can tell me will be profoundly appreciated.
Thanks!

Also, of course, it's quite fine if you can't tell me what I want to know.
The tone of this message has nothing to do with you, but with the regular
difficulty of getting truly useful information.

Thanks!

Al 

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of Michael Whapples
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 12:31 PM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: Hello and qeustion about SpeakUp

Hello,
One thing I forgot to mention, if you are planning to use espeak or IBMtts
(viavoice) then I recommend using espeakup or the ttsynth speakup connector
as these reduce the dependencies for getting the software to work. You can
still use those synths through speech-dispatcher and speechd-up if you want,
but using the specific connector software will save the fustration if for
some reason speech-dispatcher doesn't start (eg. incorrect configuration,
problem with install or even simply forgetting to start it (I have done
that, wondering why the system didn't come up talking only to find I forgot
to add speech-dispatcher to the start up scripts)).

Hope you get started with speakup and the command line fine, I believe the
command line is where the real power of Linux is released.

Michael Whapples
On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 11:20 +0000, James & Nash wrote:
> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> 
> 

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