Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Marcel:

Marcel Oats writes:
> Speakup is working fine so far, but even with a USB soundcard also
> connected, when gnome starts, I am unable to even start Orca ( for
> some reason) so how can I tell it to use a different soundcard?
> 

You actually can do quite a bit, though you still might need sighted
assistance if there's some issue on your graphical desktop.

First, you want to make sure alsa sees both sound cards:
aplay -l

Both should be listed. Next, make sure you can play audio to the second
card (assuming it's ID is 1):
aplay -D plughw:1 [some-audio.wav]

I actually keep a wav file in my home directory exactly for testing like
this. It's the only file in my home directory that starts with a
capital G in order to make it possible for me to use tab completion on
the command.

The next step, imho, or should I say in my experience, is to insure your
audio devices are consistently identified, i.e. which is hw:0, which is
hw:1, which is hw:2, etc. So far I've not needed to learn to write UID
rules, though that's the surest way. Rather, on my Fedora, I open
/etc/modprobe.d/local.conf and put:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=0
alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
options snd-card-1 index=1
options snd-usb-audio index=1
alias snd-card-2 snd-usb-audio
options snd-card-2 index=2
options snd-usb-audio index=2
alias snd-card-3 snd-indigo
options snd-card-3 index=3
options snd-indigo index=3
alias snd-card-4 snd-pcsp
options snd-card-4 index=4
options snd-pcsp index=4

My 0 device, my Intel 810 is the built in audio device on my Thinkpad. I
have two USB devices. I don't distinguish between them further, because
they reliably load the same each time. If they didn't, I'd have to put
more directives in. My third device is a PCM card. Lastly, I find it
useful to assign the speaker device to a particular ID. Believe it or
not, I've found the speaker loaded as my default audio device on some
boots. Go figure!

So, this helps keep things consistent, and that's important for reliable
performance.

For more on what you can put here look at:
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-usb-audio

BTW: To insure beeps from the speaker you might need to do, as I do on
Fedora, open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment out the black
listing of the speaker. Here's what's in my file:

# sound drivers
# #Who cares to do things Fedora's cheap way
#blacklist snd-pcsp
 
 Now, you start preparing for speech-dispatcher, without pulseaudio, for
 Orca. So, you need to get rid of pulseaudio. Best not to uninstall it,
 as something will just install it again. It may be overkill, but I do
 two things:

1.)	In /etc/asound.conf I comment out the call to pulse:
#"/etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf"


2.)	Next, I trash the pulseaudio binary as follows after becoming
root on my system:

rm -f /usr/bin/pulseaudio
touch /usr/bin/pulseaudio
chmod 400 /usr/bin/pulseaudio

Next, you tell Speech Dispatcher to use alsa, and to use the particular
sound device you want Orca speaking through. In your
/etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, you have two edits to make:

1.)	Find the part that reads something like:

# ----- AUDIO CONFIGURATION -----------

# -- AUDIO OUTPUT --

# Chooses between the possible sound output systems:
#       "pulse" - PulseAudio
#       "alsa"  - Advanced Linux Sound System
#       "oss"   - Open Sound System
#       "nas"   - Network Audio System
#       "libao" - A cross platform audio library
# Pulse audio is the default and recommended sound server. OSS and ALSA
# are only provided for compatibility with architectures that do not
# include Pulse Audio. NAS provides network transparency, but is not
# very well tested. libao is a cross platform library with plugins for
# different sound systems and provides alternative output for Pulse
# Audio
# and ALSA as well as for other backends.

 AudioOutputMethod "alsa"
  
  Note that I changed "pulseaudio" to "alsa" in the directive above.

  2.)	Tell which device to use. Find:

# Audio device for ALSA output
AudioALSADevice "plughw:1,0"

Note the 1 in hw:1,0 is something I put there. Put the correct ID for
your device at that location.

Finally, finally, you're ready to configure orca. With your desktop
started, and yourself logged in, do Alt-F2 and type:

orca -s

hth

Janina



> Marcel
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 

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)