Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Al Sten-Clanton]

Hi, Janina.

I'm pretty sure I did it from the login screen; I seem to remember 
having no speech and counting myself lucky to hear Orca.  Sorry I'm not 
more certain, but I guess sixteen days is too long ago for me to 
remember some things. :-)

Al

On 05/10/2013 03:28 PM, Janina Sajka wrote:
> Hi, Al:
>
> Glad to hear someone got this working! <grin> Though, I certainly agree
> it's not good to have your password read outloud.
>
> I tried this just now, but got no joy. Do you do this from the Desktop,
> once Orca is loaded and running? Or do you do this from the GDM login
> screen itself? Just for grins, I tried both.
>
> Janina
>
> Albert Sten-Clanton writes:
>> 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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