getting orca and espeakup/speakup to work together

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

> On 19/11/2018 21:19, John G Heim wrote:
> > What is the trick to getting speakup with software speech and orca to work at the same time. I have both debian stretch and ubuntu bionic systems and on both machines, I have to disable espeakup to get orca to work.

Didier Spaier, le lun. 19 nov. 2018 21:59:28 +0100, a ecrit:
> That's a long standing issue with Debian and derivatives' handling of audio cf. the Debian accessibility mailing list:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility/
> And especially the thread that begins with this message:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility/2018/10/msg00000.html
> 
> I tried to help on that, to no avail.
> 
> Workarounds that I know as of today:
> 1) Remove pulseaudio and install the libspeakup-ng Debian package patched by Samuel:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility/2018/11/msg00065.html
> Instructions:
> https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/tmp/sid-tmp/libespeak-ng1_1.49.2+dfsg-7~0_amd64.deb
> However, I don't know if theses packages can be used wuth stretch

There is no need to install that package in Stretch. The issue that
that package is fixing is due to the pause implementation meant to work
around the very issue he is having. That pause implementation wasn't in
Stretch, it's only in Buster.

The pause implementation requires a Linux kernel change, so that won't
be backported to Stretch unfortunately.

> Caveat: I can't provide help to remove pulseaudio (which I generally do not recommend)

In Stretch, there is no real choice: unless configuring dmix, having
pulseaudio installed necessarily means conflicts between the espeakup
daemon and Orca.

In Buster, it's not a solution, since the version of firefox there
requires pulseaudio. Thus the pause implementation in espeakup, to
make it release the sound board for Orca to take it. Conversely, when
switching off from the X session to the Linux console, we'd need to make
Orca release the sound board. It actually happens already when switching
to a Linux console where the user is not logged in, because pulseaudio
releases the sound board in that case.

Now, as you mentioned, Slint does not have the issue, because it uses
the dmix plugin. Now, to repeat myself:

- it would be useful to document how to configure dmix on the wiki
https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility

- enabling dmix by default in Debian could be an option, it "just" needs
to be discussed with the alsa maintainers.  If nobody takes the time to
do this, we'll stay with the issue.

Samuel