RE: Talking GDM [Was: Voxin was: Switching to Linux]

["Albert Sten-Clanton" <albert.e.sten_clanton@verizon.net>]

Thanks, Janina.  I'm glad to know that.  Not sure I'll try to follow suit,
but it's nice to know that so far I may be able to if necessary.

Al 

-----Original Message-----
From: Speakup [mailto:speakup-bounces@linux-speakup.org] On Behalf Of Janina
Sajka
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 3:38 PM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: Talking GDM [Was: Voxin was: Switching to Linux]

Hi, Al:

Yes, I should have been more clear.

Pulseaudio is fully inactive on my systems. This means no pulseaudio
whatsoever, not for any of my 5 audio devices. This includes my Orca over
espeak, as well as my Speakup over TTSynth. As far as I can tell, the only
penalty I've incurred is that I do NOT have earcons on the GUI desktop.
Everything else works as it should.

I am nevertheless investigating how to enable pulseaudio access to one or
two specific cards. I'm perfectly happy to have it running, but only if I
can restrict it at the card-level. Since I need to use jack for audio work,
this is the only tenable approach, imo.

Janina

Albert Sten-Clanton writes:
> Janina, thanks for the added info.  Are you still able to avoid using 
> Pulseaudio?  If so, does that mean avoiding it completely, or just 
> with Speakup?
> 
> Al
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Speakup [mailto:speakup-bounces@linux-speakup.org] On Behalf Of 
> Janina Sajka
> Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 10:48 PM
> To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
> Subject: Talking GDM [Was: Voxin was: Switching to Linux]
> 
> All right! Now we're cooking with gas.
> 
> Thanks, Al. It took a reboot, but GDM came up talking.
> 
> So, my previous disappointment was just the missing piece of info that 
> the steps below don't work on the fly, but they will work for your next
boot.
> 
> Explaining the Steps:
> 
> Ctrl-Alt-TAB Goes to the Two menu TABS up top.
> 
> Right-Arrow once takes one to the Accessibility menu (Once more would 
> be to
> Power)
> 
> Down four times is the Screenreader checkbox.
> 
> Pressing RETURN checks the checkbox.
> 
> Janina
> 
> Albert Sten-Clanton writes:
> > Janina, I'm using Fedora 18, and now have a talking login using 
> > these instructions from an e-mail last month on the Orca mailing list:
> > 
> > The easiest way to enable screen reader on GDM login screen is to 
> > press
> > ctrl+alt+tab once, then press right arrow key once, then press down 
> > ctrl+alt+arrow
> > key four
> > times and then press the enter key. This is with gnome 3.6 on arch
linux.
> > 
> > The problem with it is that Orca speaks my password, so it's good 
> > that I use headphones almost all the time.
> > 
> > Hope this helps a bit on *one* thing, anyway.
> > 
> > Al
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Speakup [mailto:speakup-bounces@linux-speakup.org] On Behalf 
> > Of Janina Sajka
> > Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 2:25 PM
> > To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
> > Subject: Re: Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux
> > 
> > I don't use Voxin. I do still use TTSynth with Speakup. The 
> > compatibility library you need is available on Fedora 18 as:
> > 
> > compat-libstdc++-296-2.96-144.1.i686
> > 
> > PS; With Orca I use speech-dispatcherd and espeak. I have to use a 
> > second physical audio device for this. I cannot get these two to 
> > share the same alsa device.
> > 
> > And, I do need to permanently terminate pulseaudio with extreme
prejudice.
> > 
> > That's about it. The Fedora GDM still isn't supporting talking 
> > login--don't get me started talking about that, though!
> > 
> > Firefox, currently at release 20, works wonderfully well. It's 
> > useful to use recent Firefox releases because the a11y code in FF is 
> > actively being updated these days
> > 
> > Janina
> > 
> > Kyle writes:
> > > According to Brandon McGinty-Carroll:
> > > # As I recall, voxen requires /dev/dsp or somesuch ancient sound API.
> > > 
> > > As far as I know, this is correct, but it's a lot worse than that. 
> > > Not only does Voxin require an ancient sound API, but it also 
> > > requires ancient C libraries in order to function. The source code 
> > > is either lost or is otherwise unavailable even to those who would 
> > > maintain it, so it can't even be rebuilt against the latest C 
> > > libraries or even get any of its numerous bugs fixed. It still 
> > > crashes on words like c a e s u r e, which according to Google is 
> > > a bitcoin client written in Python, and is also a rather common 
> > > username on some non-blindness related forums. It also crashes on 
> > > a rather common OCR error when recognizing the word Wednesday. I 
> > > googled that one as well, and turns out it is a very common OCR 
> > > scanning error, especially when scanning newspapers. I was 
> > > especially seeing it in scanned newspaper archives from the late 
> > > 1800's and early 1900's. There are also reports of random crashes 
> > > that cause Voxin and other speech synthesis engines with the exact 
> > > same codebase but different names to randomly kill the screen 
> > > reader, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, because the 
> > > source code is not available or is lost. Worse still is the fact 
> > > that many companies are actually making a profit from licensing 
> > > something so outdated, broken and unstable, but I guess that's no 
> > > different from what Microsoft has been doing for years <smile>. It 
> > > may fall on deaf ears for some reason, but my recommendation is to 
> > > avoid Voxin
> > and all the other voices like it.
> > > Use eSpeak, because it ships with most distros and just works. If 
> > > you don't like the way eSpeak sounds, you can still get festival 
> > > working, and Festival is capable of running some amazing free 
> > > voices. There's also Pico, which is now supported natively in 
> > > speech-dispatcher. All these voices sound better and work better 
> > > than Voxin, which literally makes my head hurt.
> > > ~Kyle
> > > http://kyle.tk/
> > > --
> > > "Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
> > > Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Speakup mailing list
> > > Speakup@linux-speakup.org
> > > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> > 
> > --
> > 
> > Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
> > 			sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net
> > 		Email:	janina@rednote.net
> > 
> > Linux Foundation Fellow
> > Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org
> > 
> > The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
> > Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
> > 	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup@linux-speakup.org
> > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup@linux-speakup.org
> > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> --
> 
> Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
> 			sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net
> 		Email:	janina@rednote.net
> 
> Linux Foundation Fellow
> Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org
> 
> The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
> Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
> 	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina@rednote.net

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

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/

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