Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Littlefield, Tyler]

Hello all:
I have a couple of questions, most of which is just clarification.
I am really interested in making a sort of live cd, as well as something 
that could be installed for both GUI and cli usage. I'm bouncing between 
arch and Debian, but I think all of these questions apply.

First, I know there is a lot of trouble making speakup and orca work 
together, for example with audio. If I understand this right, pulse 
works through Alsa. Is there a way that Speakup could just be designated 
to work with Alsa, or perhaps Espeakup could be modified to work with 
Pulse, then everything could run happily through Pulse. How have you all 
handled this in the past?

My other issue is setting up the live cd/installer. I know about 
squashfs, which is used on a lot of live/installation cds. How hard is 
something like this to get going? I remember a project a while back--I 
think I looked into it when I was trying to help Vinux, but from what I 
remember it died off. What sorts of tools are used for the installers 
and just the live cd creation in general?

-- 

Take  I know there are changes that need to be made, like making it just jump you to a root prompt rather than requiring you to log in on a live cd.
care,
Ty
Web: http://tds-solutions.net
The Aspen project: a light-weight barebones mud engine
http://code.google.com/p/aspenmud

Sent from my toaster.

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Littlefield, Tyler]

I forgot one thing in my last post. I've done the install of orca on 
Debian through apt just to see how it goes. It came up speaking, and it 
showed the window, but it was really weird because it did not let me 
give it any feedback. It just rambled and rambled and wouldn't accept 
anything. Has anyone played with this before? Any tips there would be cool.
On 1/26/2012 2:51 PM, Littlefield, Tyler wrote:
> Hello all:
> I have a couple of questions, most of which is just clarification.
> I am really interested in making a sort of live cd, as well as 
> something that could be installed for both GUI and cli usage. I'm 
> bouncing between arch and Debian, but I think all of these questions 
> apply.
>
> First, I know there is a lot of trouble making speakup and orca work 
> together, for example with audio. If I understand this right, pulse 
> works through Alsa. Is there a way that Speakup could just be 
> designated to work with Alsa, or perhaps Espeakup could be modified to 
> work with Pulse, then everything could run happily through Pulse. How 
> have you all handled this in the past?
>
> My other issue is setting up the live cd/installer. I know about 
> squashfs, which is used on a lot of live/installation cds. How hard is 
> something like this to get going? I remember a project a while back--I 
> think I looked into it when I was trying to help Vinux, but from what 
> I remember it died off. What sorts of tools are used for the 
> installers and just the live cd creation in general?
>


-- 

Take care,
Ty
Web: http://tds-solutions.net
The Aspen project: a light-weight barebones mud engine
http://code.google.com/p/aspenmud

Sent from my toaster.

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Marcel Oats]

Well I have tried installing the latest debian testing amd64, and it didn't 
even install the desktop, even though I told it to install choices 1 
(desktop) 6 (file server) and 10 (common system utilities.)
It seems that if I install gnome manually through apt, it installs, boots, 
and yes we either have the same issues with Orca not speaking, or it isn't 
installed? excuse me?

For us people who aren't all that familiar with how to make things work, I 
do wish it was a fairly straightforward process to do something like this.

Yes, we do have software speech through speakup.
Many thanks in possible ignorance,
Marcel
 

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Janina Sajka]

Littlefield, Tyler writes:
> First, I know there is a lot of trouble making speakup and orca work
> together, for example with audio. If I understand this right, pulse
> works through Alsa. Is there a way that Speakup could just be
> designated to work with Alsa, or perhaps Espeakup could be modified
> to work with Pulse, then everything could run happily through Pulse.
> How have you all handled this in the past?
> 

I do not use pulseaudio. I'll spare you the long rant as to why. Suffice
it to say you don't need pulseaudio to use Orca.

I do use two separate sound cards, one for Speakup and the other for
Orca. It's unfortunate, but my other choices pretty much require this.

With the latest Orca, for Gnome 3.2, there's no choice other than Speech
Dispatcher for espeak TTS.

I still use TTSynth for Speakup with the Speakup-Connector, though
espeak works perfectly well with Speakup, of course. But, I just find it easier to keep both
environments very separate. At $10 for a USB audio device (C-Media),
this just isn't much of a burden.

Janina

-- 

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

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

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

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Marcel Oats]

Hi Janina, that actually makes sense to me, but lets suppose we're in the 
situation that I am in, where I have been playing with Debian Wheezy amd64 
version, and wish to have both environments available.  Speakup is working 
fine so far, but even with a USB soundcard also connected, when gnome 
starts, I am unable to even start Orca ( for some reason) so how can I tell 
it to use a different soundcard? I may be confused here a bit. Also, I am 
waiting until someone is nearby so as we can see if there is an error 
onscreen.

Sorry if it seems a little rambly.
Marcel
 

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Robert cole]

Hello, Marcel.

I apologize as I have missed a lot of your posts concerning this topic. 
Did you compile Orca from source by any chance?

I tried to test out Debian Wheezy (Testing) on a virtual machine, and I 
found that Orca's package (gnome-orca) is not in the testing 
repositories right now. I also went to 
http://packages.debian.org/gnome-orca, and it appears that Orca is not 
in the Wheezy repository at all.

I hope that this information is of some help to you.

Take care.

On 01/31/2012 08:33 PM, Marcel Oats wrote:
> Hi Janina, that actually makes sense to me, but lets suppose we're in 
> the situation that I am in, where I have been playing with Debian 
> Wheezy amd64 version, and wish to have both environments available.  
> Speakup is working fine so far, but even with a USB soundcard also 
> connected, when gnome starts, I am unable to even start Orca ( for 
> some reason) so how can I tell it to use a different soundcard? I may 
> be confused here a bit. Also, I am waiting until someone is nearby so 
> as we can see if there is an error onscreen.
>
> Sorry if it seems a little rambly.
> Marcel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Marcel Oats]

Oh, yes it certainly is helpful!  Perhaps, in the future, orca will appear 
in this distro; perhaps this could be due to it still being a testing 
release?  My main reason for choosing this, is that software speech is 
available via speakup, and I have a very unreliable HW synth, and hardly any 
serial ports.
No, I did not compile it from source.  Thanks for clarifying this.

Marcel
 

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Marcel:

Marcel Oats writes:
> Speakup is working fine so far, but even with a USB soundcard also
> connected, when gnome starts, I am unable to even start Orca ( for
> some reason) so how can I tell it to use a different soundcard?
> 

You actually can do quite a bit, though you still might need sighted
assistance if there's some issue on your graphical desktop.

First, you want to make sure alsa sees both sound cards:
aplay -l

Both should be listed. Next, make sure you can play audio to the second
card (assuming it's ID is 1):
aplay -D plughw:1 [some-audio.wav]

I actually keep a wav file in my home directory exactly for testing like
this. It's the only file in my home directory that starts with a
capital G in order to make it possible for me to use tab completion on
the command.

The next step, imho, or should I say in my experience, is to insure your
audio devices are consistently identified, i.e. which is hw:0, which is
hw:1, which is hw:2, etc. So far I've not needed to learn to write UID
rules, though that's the surest way. Rather, on my Fedora, I open
/etc/modprobe.d/local.conf and put:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=0
alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
options snd-card-1 index=1
options snd-usb-audio index=1
alias snd-card-2 snd-usb-audio
options snd-card-2 index=2
options snd-usb-audio index=2
alias snd-card-3 snd-indigo
options snd-card-3 index=3
options snd-indigo index=3
alias snd-card-4 snd-pcsp
options snd-card-4 index=4
options snd-pcsp index=4

My 0 device, my Intel 810 is the built in audio device on my Thinkpad. I
have two USB devices. I don't distinguish between them further, because
they reliably load the same each time. If they didn't, I'd have to put
more directives in. My third device is a PCM card. Lastly, I find it
useful to assign the speaker device to a particular ID. Believe it or
not, I've found the speaker loaded as my default audio device on some
boots. Go figure!

So, this helps keep things consistent, and that's important for reliable
performance.

For more on what you can put here look at:
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-usb-audio

BTW: To insure beeps from the speaker you might need to do, as I do on
Fedora, open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment out the black
listing of the speaker. Here's what's in my file:

# sound drivers
# #Who cares to do things Fedora's cheap way
#blacklist snd-pcsp
 
 Now, you start preparing for speech-dispatcher, without pulseaudio, for
 Orca. So, you need to get rid of pulseaudio. Best not to uninstall it,
 as something will just install it again. It may be overkill, but I do
 two things:

1.)	In /etc/asound.conf I comment out the call to pulse:
#"/etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf"


2.)	Next, I trash the pulseaudio binary as follows after becoming
root on my system:

rm -f /usr/bin/pulseaudio
touch /usr/bin/pulseaudio
chmod 400 /usr/bin/pulseaudio

Next, you tell Speech Dispatcher to use alsa, and to use the particular
sound device you want Orca speaking through. In your
/etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, you have two edits to make:

1.)	Find the part that reads something like:

# ----- AUDIO CONFIGURATION -----------

# -- AUDIO OUTPUT --

# Chooses between the possible sound output systems:
#       "pulse" - PulseAudio
#       "alsa"  - Advanced Linux Sound System
#       "oss"   - Open Sound System
#       "nas"   - Network Audio System
#       "libao" - A cross platform audio library
# Pulse audio is the default and recommended sound server. OSS and ALSA
# are only provided for compatibility with architectures that do not
# include Pulse Audio. NAS provides network transparency, but is not
# very well tested. libao is a cross platform library with plugins for
# different sound systems and provides alternative output for Pulse
# Audio
# and ALSA as well as for other backends.

 AudioOutputMethod "alsa"
  
  Note that I changed "pulseaudio" to "alsa" in the directive above.

  2.)	Tell which device to use. Find:

# Audio device for ALSA output
AudioALSADevice "plughw:1,0"

Note the 1 in hw:1,0 is something I put there. Put the correct ID for
your device at that location.

Finally, finally, you're ready to configure orca. With your desktop
started, and yourself logged in, do Alt-F2 and type:

orca -s

hth

Janina



> Marcel
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 

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

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

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

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[Robert cole]

You're welcome, Marcel.

I'm hoping that Orca will be available someday soon; I'd really like to 
test out Debian. I am still kind of on the search for which distro I 
want to use as a main desktop distribution.

On 02/01/2012 01:23 AM, Marcel Oats wrote:
> Oh, yes it certainly is helpful!  Perhaps, in the future, orca will 
> appear in this distro; perhaps this could be due to it still being a 
> testing release?  My main reason for choosing this, is that software 
> speech is available via speakup, and I have a very unreliable HW 
> synth, and hardly any serial ports.
> No, I did not compile it from source.  Thanks for clarifying this.
>
> Marcel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: Installing orca and making it play nice with Speakup

[bigd]

Hi,
As far as errors on the desktop, try logging in as your regular user from a console, and doing:
export DISPLAY=:0
orca
If there are any errors, you should be able to see them.

HTH,
KJ4UFX
{.i doi .tcikoritys. mi cuxna ba'e do}

On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 11:54:11AM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> Hi, Marcel:
> 
> Marcel Oats writes:
> > Speakup is working fine so far, but even with a USB soundcard also
> > connected, when gnome starts, I am unable to even start Orca ( for
> > some reason) so how can I tell it to use a different soundcard?
> > 
> 
> You actually can do quite a bit, though you still might need sighted
> assistance if there's some issue on your graphical desktop.
> 
> First, you want to make sure alsa sees both sound cards:
> aplay -l
> 
> Both should be listed. Next, make sure you can play audio to the second
> card (assuming it's ID is 1):
> aplay -D plughw:1 [some-audio.wav]
> 
> I actually keep a wav file in my home directory exactly for testing like
> this. It's the only file in my home directory that starts with a
> capital G in order to make it possible for me to use tab completion on
> the command.
> 
> The next step, imho, or should I say in my experience, is to insure your
> audio devices are consistently identified, i.e. which is hw:0, which is
> hw:1, which is hw:2, etc. So far I've not needed to learn to write UID
> rules, though that's the surest way. Rather, on my Fedora, I open
> /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf and put:
> 
> alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
> options snd-card-0 index=0
> options snd-hda-intel index=0
> alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
> options snd-card-1 index=1
> options snd-usb-audio index=1
> alias snd-card-2 snd-usb-audio
> options snd-card-2 index=2
> options snd-usb-audio index=2
> alias snd-card-3 snd-indigo
> options snd-card-3 index=3
> options snd-indigo index=3
> alias snd-card-4 snd-pcsp
> options snd-card-4 index=4
> options snd-pcsp index=4
> 
> My 0 device, my Intel 810 is the built in audio device on my Thinkpad. I
> have two USB devices. I don't distinguish between them further, because
> they reliably load the same each time. If they didn't, I'd have to put
> more directives in. My third device is a PCM card. Lastly, I find it
> useful to assign the speaker device to a particular ID. Believe it or
> not, I've found the speaker loaded as my default audio device on some
> boots. Go figure!
> 
> So, this helps keep things consistent, and that's important for reliable
> performance.
> 
> For more on what you can put here look at:
> http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-usb-audio
> 
> BTW: To insure beeps from the speaker you might need to do, as I do on
> Fedora, open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment out the black
> listing of the speaker. Here's what's in my file:
> 
> # sound drivers
> # #Who cares to do things Fedora's cheap way
> #blacklist snd-pcsp
>  
>  Now, you start preparing for speech-dispatcher, without pulseaudio, for
>  Orca. So, you need to get rid of pulseaudio. Best not to uninstall it,
>  as something will just install it again. It may be overkill, but I do
>  two things:
> 
> 1.)	In /etc/asound.conf I comment out the call to pulse:
> #"/etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf"
> 
> 
> 2.)	Next, I trash the pulseaudio binary as follows after becoming
> root on my system:
> 
> rm -f /usr/bin/pulseaudio
> touch /usr/bin/pulseaudio
> chmod 400 /usr/bin/pulseaudio
> 
> Next, you tell Speech Dispatcher to use alsa, and to use the particular
> sound device you want Orca speaking through. In your
> /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, you have two edits to make:
> 
> 1.)	Find the part that reads something like:
> 
> # ----- AUDIO CONFIGURATION -----------
> 
> # -- AUDIO OUTPUT --
> 
> # Chooses between the possible sound output systems:
> #       "pulse" - PulseAudio
> #       "alsa"  - Advanced Linux Sound System
> #       "oss"   - Open Sound System
> #       "nas"   - Network Audio System
> #       "libao" - A cross platform audio library
> # Pulse audio is the default and recommended sound server. OSS and ALSA
> # are only provided for compatibility with architectures that do not
> # include Pulse Audio. NAS provides network transparency, but is not
> # very well tested. libao is a cross platform library with plugins for
> # different sound systems and provides alternative output for Pulse
> # Audio
> # and ALSA as well as for other backends.
> 
>  AudioOutputMethod "alsa"
>   
>   Note that I changed "pulseaudio" to "alsa" in the directive above.
> 
>   2.)	Tell which device to use. Find:
> 
> # Audio device for ALSA output
> AudioALSADevice "plughw:1,0"
> 
> Note the 1 in hw:1,0 is something I put there. Put the correct ID for
> your device at that location.
> 
> Finally, finally, you're ready to configure orca. With your desktop
> started, and yourself logged in, do Alt-F2 and type:
> 
> orca -s
> 
> hth
> 
> Janina
> 
> 
> 
> > Marcel
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> -- 
> 
> Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
> 		sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net
> 
> Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
> Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org
> 
> Chair, Protocols & Formats
> Web Accessibility Initiative	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
> World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup