Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[bigd]

Hi,
As far as errors on the desktop, try logging in as your regular user from a console, and doing:
export DISPLAY=:0
orca
If there are any errors, you should be able to see them.

HTH,
KJ4UFX
{.i doi .tcikoritys. mi cuxna ba'e do}

On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 11:54:11AM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> 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)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup