Espeakup and Speech-Dispatcher-git--Fighting again?

[Janina Sajka]

Thanks, Chris!

I'd totaly forgotten about libao.conf. Come to find out that I've
already got a plughw:1 directive there. Perhaps you pointed me to that
once upon a time before old age squashed my recollection of that.

The real problem I'm having since updating my Arch last Friday is that
using startx to get the desktop environment going has been killing
espeakup on my console environment. I can bring it back with a systemctl
restart espeakup, but it comes back on the wrong sound card, and that's
a problem because the next card, my alsa default device as specified in
asound.conf, is my Sennheiser headset which I need available for use
with linphonec.

I've just recently gotten linphone working again by clearing out years
of compiles and starting over from scratch. We'll see how stable it is.
I can make calls, but accepting an incoming call immediately seq faults.
Nevertheless, this is progress, and I dearly want to be able to use that
headset for outbound teleconferences.

For whatever reason whether or not starting the graphical desktop does
or doesn't kill espeakup seems to be a hit or miss thing. I've booted
some dozen times today and sometimes it breaks, and sometimes it
doesn't. At the moment I'm working both in the gui and in the text
console, so I'm disinclined to tweak very much.

Didier's espeakup configuration for slink looks tantalizing. I wonder
how hard it would be to pass an alsa_card param in the Arch build?

Best,

Janina

Chris Brannon writes:
> Janina Sajka writes:
> > The reason is that the current speech-dispatcher relase
> > isn't correctly accepting an alsa card designation, i.e. it won't honor
> > these two directives in speechd.conf:
> >
> >  AudioOutputMethod "libao"
> >  AudioALSADevice "plughw:1"
> 
> Janina,
> Unfortunately there's noway to specify an output device or even a driver
> with Speech Dispatcher's libao backend.  It uses "default", whatever
> that happens to be on your system.  You might be able to change the default
> with the ALSA_CARD environment variable, but you'd have to disable all of
> Speech Dispatcher's autospawn stuff and start it manually.
> AudioALSADevice is just for the ALSA backend in Speech Dispatcher.
> 
> Your other option here would be to use libao's configuration file,
> /etc/libao.conf or ~/.libao, to pass along the options you need.  I
> think the options you want are default_driver and dev.
> It's a bit of a blunt instrument because it sets defaults for everything
> that uses libao.
> 
> I used to know my way around the Speech Dispatcher codebase very well.
> I think it wouldn't be too hard to add the functionality you want to their
> libao backend.  I'm willing to write the patch, but I won't make
> any promises about when it'll be done.
> 
> If somebody else wants to take it on, just let me know, so there isn't
> duplication of work.  I think it would be a good first project for somebody
> who knows C and wants to "get their feet wet" with the Speech Dispatcher code.
> 
> -- Chris

-- 

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