getting orca and espeakup/speakup to work together

[Zachary Kline]

I thought that Dmix was configured automatically in most recent versions of Alsa. The problem seems to specifically lie between espeakup and PUlseaudio, as far as I can tell.



> On Nov 20, 2018, at 8:13 AM, John G Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> wrote:
> 
> I found a vague howto on getting dmix to work but it says that if you use dmix, you have to configure each sound app to use it. Is that right? It seems more trouble than it is worth.
> 
> Is this problem part of the kernel-space vs user-space problem? I would settle for getting speech during start up. I can probably put something in the X11 configuration to disable espeakup once the GUI starts up. But I am wondering if there is a path forward on this.
> 
> future.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 11/19/18 3:21 PM, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>> 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
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