getting orca and espeakup/speakup to work together

[Janina Sajka]

I believe it's for each device, not each app. Note that you will have
multiple devices on a given card, e.g. hdmi and analog.

There are a lot of poorly written docs out there.

John G Heim writes:
> 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
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> 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