espeak-ng and espeakup-git issues

[Janina Sajka]

Progress by way of an update to my woes ...

I resolved most issues by clearing out ~/.pulse and /etc/pulse and
reinstalling pulse audio.

Bottom line: espeakup-git with espeak-ng is now working quite well. No
more issues with broken Speakup control. It's all behaving even though
pa isn't fully functional, e.g. paplay not working.

I still get nothing from systemctl start espeakup at user.service. But
systemctl start espeakup does the trick.

Janina

Janina Sajka writes:
> I'm reposting an excerpt from a message I posted on the Orca list this
> morning, but it's really not about Orca. It's all about Speakup using
> espeakup-git and espeak-ng.
> 
> Here's the context. Didier helped me to get both espeak-ng and
> espeakup-git to build. I'm now able to launch it on my X86_64 Arch
> system. But, there are very significant issues that will probably have
> me rolling back to the old espeak and the shipping espeakup.
> 
> Details below quoted and edited to include only Speakup related info.
> Any suggestions most welcome.
> 
> Didier Spaier writes:
> > ...
> > > Speakup won't work, and espeakup-git won't build with a similar error,
> > > i.e. -lespeak not found.
> > 
> > Not a big issue.
> > Reinstall espeak-ng, then either edit the make command
> > of the PKGBUILD here:
> > https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=espeakup-git
> > si it becomes
> > make LDLIBS='-lespeak-ng -lpthread'
> > or edit the Makefile in the SLKBUILD,
> > inserting before the "make" line, in the build() function these lines
> > sed "/LDLIBS/s/.*/LDLIBS=-lespeak-ng -lpthread/" Makefile > dummy
> > mv dummy Makefile
> > 
> > I don't know what is the recommended  Arch way, sorry I never
> > used Arch.
> > 
> The Arch tools that allow for building Arch User Repository (AUR)
> applications like espeak-ng, speech-dispatcher-git, espeakup-git, or
> orca-git provide an easy mechanism for this situation. One is prompted
> to choose editing the build and install files early in the process, so I
> was able to add your code immediately above the make } directive in the
> build file and all worked as expected from that point.
> 
> However, espeakup-git is not all that usable. I will leave this
> configuration working for now in case someone has some good suggestions.
> 
> Problems noted so far:
> 
> 1.	The post installation guidance printed to screen by espeakup-git
> install is not working for me. Enabling espeakup at user does nothing. In
> order to get speech output, I have to enable espeakup explicitly, and
> sometimes run a 'sudo systemctl restart espeakup' after logging in.
> 
> 2.	I discovered systemctl start speakupconf is assuming an
> /etc/speakup directory with relevant data. I had to puruse journalctl to
> discover this. Shouldn't this be checked on speakupconf install?
> 
> 3.	espeakup-git is honoring the default card directive in
> *	/etc/asound.conf. This is new. The shipping espeakup, as all
> *	previous incarnations, simply chose the first available audio
> *	card. I need my Speakup device to be different from the alsa
> *	default. This is a problem for me, though I can live with it for
> *	the moment.
> 
> 4.	Setting /etc/asound.conf to default card 0 loads a totaly
> *	unusable speakup. Screen review on the numpad is quite broken,
> *	especially 4-5-6 and 1-2-3 (word and char) review. Also, speech
> *	is NOT immediately silenced by Keypad-Enter or Ctrl. CARD 0 is
> *	the onboard HDA Intel audio device.
> 
> 5.	Resetting the default in /etc/asound.conf to CARD 2 fixes much
> *	of the problem in 4. above. CARD 2 is a Sennheiser headset
> *	device that I intend for making SIP calls, but both linphone and
> *	freeswitch are currently broken on Arch, so this is the
> *	configuration I've temporarily resumed using. Screen review
> *	works as expected here, but silencing speech is still an issue.
> *	Also, a spurious "space" is read with 7-8-9 and after pressing
> *	Enter on a command.
> 
> 6.	In both cases, both speech-dispatcher and espeakup, my cards are
> blocked to other output, i.e. no dmix. This is new. The shipping
> espeakup was not giving me this problem.
> 
> 7.	I should note that I have espeak-ng on two machines. The
> problems resolved in this thread were from my main desktop X86_64
> system. I have previously successfully installed Arch toa USB3 flash
> drive for booting a 2013 vintage Apple Airbook. Until the update just
> this week to the latest Arch 4.17.3 kernel, plus whatever audio drivers
> came with that update, the problems with espeakup-git mentioned above
> were NOT visible on the Apple, except for the reading of the spurious
> "space" char. However, the Apple is similarly broken now. Something in
> very recent updates has broken things badly on the Apple.
> 
> Janina
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 

Janina Sajka

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

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa