BEWARE: Fedora 15 & 16 Unusable for the Speech Dependent Orca User

[Janina Sajka]

If you depend on speech-dispatcher for screen reader access, e.g. with
Orca, stay away from Fedora 15 and the upcoming Fedora 16 until there's
a fix for bug 743762:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=743762

Unfortunately, there has been no activity on this bug since it was reported
several weeks ago.

Please note, furthermore, that there is no longer any other speech option for Orca
The old gnome-speech option will not function over D-Bus, and should,
frankly, have been removed.
Symptoms

Speech Dispatcher will only speak for the root user. It will not speak
for an ordinary user.


This does not appear to be a problem with the graphical environment,
however, as it can be demonstrated from the console using spd-say.

Issuing the following command as root works as expected.  Issuing this
command as an ordinary user hangs until a Ctrl-C.
Furthermore, the audio device remains "busy" until the offending
orphaned pid is manually killed. Stopping Speech-Dispat cher will not
kill this pid.

Lastly, the problem does not appear to be with Speech-Dispatcher itself,
inasmuch as the build provided on F-15 dates to March last, and worked
satisfactorally until approximately one month ago.

Janina

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
		sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina at a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

Chair, Protocols & Formats
Web Accessibility Initiative	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)