Talking GDM [Was: Voxin was: Switching to Linux]

Albert Sten-Clanton albert.e.sten_clanton at verizon.net
Mon May 13 10:33:22 EDT 2013 

Janina, thanks for the added info.  Are you still able to avoid using
Pulseaudio?  If so, does that mean avoiding it completely, or just with
Speakup?  

Al 

-----Original Message-----
From: Speakup [mailto:speakup-bounces at linux-speakup.org] On Behalf Of Janina
Sajka
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 10:48 PM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Talking GDM [Was: Voxin was: Switching to Linux]

All right! Now we're cooking with gas.

Thanks, Al. It took a reboot, but GDM came up talking.

So, my previous disappointment was just the missing piece of info that the
steps below don't work on the fly, but they will work for your next boot.

Explaining the Steps:

Ctrl-Alt-TAB Goes to the Two menu TABS up top.

Right-Arrow once takes one to the Accessibility menu (Once more would be to
Power)

Down four times is the Screenreader checkbox.

Pressing RETURN checks the checkbox.

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 
> ctrl+alt+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/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 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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