Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Albert Sten-Clanton]

Janina, I'm using Fedora 18, and now have a talking login using these
instructions from an e-mail last month on the Orca mailing list:

The easiest way to enable screen reader on GDM login screen is to press
ctrl+alt+tab once, then press right arrow key once, then press down arrow
key four
times and then press the enter key. This is with gnome 3.6 on arch linux.

The problem with it is that Orca speaks my password, so it's good that I use
headphones almost all the time.

Hope this helps a bit on *one* thing, anyway.

Al 

-----Original Message-----
From: Speakup [mailto:speakup-bounces at linux-speakup.org] On Behalf Of Janina
Sajka
Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 2:25 PM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

I don't use Voxin. I do still use TTSynth with Speakup. The compatibility
library you need is available on Fedora 18 as:

compat-libstdc++-296-2.96-144.1.i686

PS; With Orca I use speech-dispatcherd and espeak. I have to use a second
physical audio device for this. I cannot get these two to share the same
alsa device.

And, I do need to permanently terminate pulseaudio with extreme prejudice.

That's about it. The Fedora GDM still isn't supporting talking login--don't
get me started talking about that, though!

Firefox, currently at release 20, works wonderfully well. It's useful to use
recent Firefox releases because the a11y code in FF is actively being
updated these days

Janina

Kyle writes:
> According to Brandon McGinty-Carroll:
> # As I recall, voxen requires /dev/dsp or somesuch ancient sound API.
> 
> As far as I know, this is correct, but it's a lot worse than that. Not 
> only does Voxin require an ancient sound API, but it also requires 
> ancient C libraries in order to function. The source code is either 
> lost or is otherwise unavailable even to those who would maintain it, 
> so it can't even be rebuilt against the latest C libraries or even get 
> any of its numerous bugs fixed. It still crashes on words like c a e s 
> u r e, which according to Google is a bitcoin client written in 
> Python, and is also a rather common username on some non-blindness 
> related forums. It also crashes on a rather common OCR error when 
> recognizing the word Wednesday. I googled that one as well, and turns 
> out it is a very common OCR scanning error, especially when scanning 
> newspapers. I was especially seeing it in scanned newspaper archives 
> from the late 1800's and early 1900's. There are also reports of 
> random crashes that cause Voxin and other speech synthesis engines 
> with the exact same codebase but different names to randomly kill the 
> screen reader, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, because 
> the source code is not available or is lost. Worse still is the fact 
> that many companies are actually making a profit from licensing 
> something so outdated, broken and unstable, but I guess that's no 
> different from what Microsoft has been doing for years <smile>. It may 
> fall on deaf ears for some reason, but my recommendation is to avoid Voxin
and all the other voices like it.
> Use eSpeak, because it ships with most distros and just works. If you 
> don't like the way eSpeak sounds, you can still get festival working, 
> and Festival is capable of running some amazing free voices. There's 
> also Pico, which is now supported natively in speech-dispatcher. All 
> these voices sound better and work better than Voxin, which literally 
> makes my head hurt.
> ~Kyle
> http://kyle.tk/
> --
> "Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
> Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 

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

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

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

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