Questions - Speakup w/Accent-SA & VIAVOICE

Questions - Speakup w/Accent-SA & VIAVOICE

[Monty Lilburn]

Hi all,

I am using Speakup V1.0 with V2.4.18-pre2 of the kernel and the Accent SA
synthesizer.  I do not exclusively use speakup, it is primarily used only
when I need to access my main linux console, though I hope to use it more
as it develops!

The problem I am experiencing is that my Accent-SA is not very responsive
at times.  It is very fast/responsive when I input commands such as
Insert+numpad-enter (to turn it on/off), when I have it read the entire
screen (numpad+plus-sign), or when it is reading my Bash prompt.  Where it
has problems with responsivness is when I use the screen review keys on
the numpad such as numpad+2, or numpad+8.  Basically I hit the numpad+2,
then the synthesizer will take a couple of seconds to respond with the
information.  This is slightly perplexing  because some speakup commands
process immediately.  I know that the Accent Sa is capable of very quick
response as it's quite good with the Vocal Eyes Accent driver as well as
the driver used with Jaws, so I am thinking either I have something
configured wrong, or there is a glitch with the speakup Accent code...  Is
anyone else having this problem, or does anyone know how to improve it?

My second question has to do with re-initializing the synthesizer after
the kernel has booted.  Just after my kernel begins to load, Speakup loads
and I hear "Accent Ready" from my Accent-SA.  I have noticed that if my
Accent-SA gets turned off or looses power after my Kernel has fully
booted, that Speakup gets out of sink with the Accent causing poor
response all of the time, the inability to silence the speach (with the
controle key) and factory default speach settings.  Is there a Speakup
command which will issue a synthesizer initialization  after the kernel
has booted?

My third question has to do with Speakup and the IBM ViaVoice TTS speach
engine.  Is it possible or will it soon to be possible to use it with
Speakup?  I've tetsted it's demos and its response time is very nice when
run on a system that is 950 MHZ and 512 mb of ram.

thanks
  Monty

-- 

  --------------------------------------------------------------

                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Questions - Speakup w/Accent-SA & VIAVOICE

[Frank Carmickle]

Hi Monty

I don't know why your having this trouble.  I am running with speakup 1.0
on 2.4.12 with out any glitches.  My accentsa is very very fast.  When I
hit the 2 on the keypad it tells me very quickly what the char is at my
current pos.  You may want to look at the value of trigger_time in
/proc/speakup/acntsa.  20 is about the right value.

If you disconnect your accent or turn it off for some reason just allow
speakups buffer to fill up by using some review functions.  After a bit it
will time out.  Then you can turn the accent on again and then press
insert enter on the numpad.  This will reinitialize speakup.  However at
the current time it doesn't check to see what the setting in /proc are so
it will initialize back to the hardcoded defaults in the driver.  

Kirk has no desire to write a driver that supports a software synth that
isn't covered under the gpl.  This includes obviously the viavoice tts.

Welcome to the list.


-- 
     Frank Carmickle
phone:     412 761-9568
email:     frankiec@dryrose.com

Re: Questions - Speakup w/Accent-SA & VIAVOICE

[William F. Acker WB2FLW +1-303-777-8123]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Monty Lilburn wrote:

> I am using Speakup V1.0 with V2.4.18-pre2 of the kernel and the Accent SA
> synthesizer.  I do not exclusively use speakup, it is primarily used only
> when I need to access my main linux console, though I hope to use it more
> as it develops!
Please outline the ways in which Speakup needs to develop before you can 
use it seriously.  Speakup is all I use.


          Bill in 303/720, a native of 516  now 631.
Are you a phone freak too?

Re: Questions - Speakup w/Accent-SA & VIAVOICE

[Monty Lilburn]

Hi Frank,

thanks for responding to my problem.  I tried your suggestion of setting
the trigger time to 20 but that didn't seam to make any noticable
improvement.  Below is a listing of my values in /proc/speakup/accent_sa.
Could you please tell me if any other value looks way out of wack?

delay_time:400
full_time:1000
jiffy_delta:3
queued_bytes:0
sent_bytes:0
trigger_time:20
version:Version-0.14

These settings with the exception of trigger_time are the "out of the box"
defaults.  I had speakup installed when I was running a 2.2 kernel as well
and I still had the delay issue when executing certain review functions...

thanks

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Frank Carmickle wrote:

>I don't know why your having this trouble.  I am running with speakup 1.0
>on 2.4.12 with out any glitches.  My accentsa is very very fast.  When I
>hit the 2 on the keypad it tells me very quickly what the char is at my
>current pos.  You may want to look at the value of trigger_time in
>/proc/speakup/acntsa.  20 is about the right value.

-- 

  --------------------------------------------------------------

                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Questions - Speakup w/Accent-SA & VIAVOICE

[Frank Carmickle]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Monty Lilburn wrote:
> Could you please tell me if any other value looks way out of wack?

No there all fine.  What accentsa are you using?  The older one with the
separate power and volume on the back or the newer one with a thumb wheel
on the front?  What are your dip switch settings set to?  What uart is
this?


-- 
     Frank Carmickle
phone:     412 761-9568
email:     frankiec@dryrose.com

Re: Speakup w/Accent-SA

[Monty Lilburn]

Hi Bill,

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, William F. Acker WB2FLW +1-303-777-8123 wrote:

>On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Monty Lilburn wrote:
>
>> I am using Speakup V1.0 with V2.4.18-pre2 of the kernel and the Accent SA
>> synthesizer.  I do not exclusively use speakup, it is primarily used only
>> when I need to access my main linux console, though I hope to use it more
>> as it develops!
>Please outline the ways in which Speakup needs to develop before you can
>use it seriously.  Speakup is all I use.

I am currently suffering from the topic of my original post (my Accent-sa
isn't very responsive when executing some speakup commands), so that is
keeping me from using it as my primary means of access.  I have also had
problems with tracking properly in Pine (my mail client of choice) and Jo
(my editor of choice).  My cursor tracking issues could very well have to
do with me not optomizing my speakup configuration properly!

>          Bill in 303/720, a native of 516  now 631.
>Are you a phone freak too?

I'm not a phone freak!  It's just a signature thats all!
It's
-- 

  --------------------------------------------------------------

                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Speakup w/Accent-SA

[Monty Lilburn]

Hi Frank,

On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Frank Carmickle wrote:

>No there all fine.  What accentsa are you using?  The older one with the
>separate power and volume on the back or the newer one with a thumb wheel
>on the front?  What are your dip switch settings set to?  What uart is
>this?

My accent-sa sounds like the newer one you describe.  The thumb-wheel
volume controle is on the front.  The uart on my machine is a 16550A, and
I am currently at work and I am not 100% sure of the dip-switch settings,
I think the fourth and last switch are down.  Does speakup work better
with E7 or N8?

I have booted up via a dos disk with Vocal Eyes on this machine and it
works great!    Maybe it's the dip switches though...

thanks
  Monty

  --------------------------------------------------------------

                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Speakup w/Accent-SA

[David Poehlman]

I used speakup with an accent sa as described here with the wheel on t
ehfront and got it talking right away with the 4th and last dipswitches
down which is the default for accent sa.  It's a bit clugy on my machine
and sounds a bit like donald duck or did anyway, but it worked well.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Monty Lilburn" <monty@bc.cx>
To: <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 4:14 PM
Subject: Re: Speakup w/Accent-SA


Hi Frank,

On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Frank Carmickle wrote:

>No there all fine.  What accentsa are you using?  The older one with
the
>separate power and volume on the back or the newer one with a thumb
wheel
>on the front?  What are your dip switch settings set to?  What uart is
>this?

My accent-sa sounds like the newer one you describe.  The thumb-wheel
volume controle is on the front.  The uart on my machine is a 16550A,
and
I am currently at work and I am not 100% sure of the dip-switch
settings,
I think the fourth and last switch are down.  Does speakup work better
with E7 or N8?

I have booted up via a dos disk with Vocal Eyes on this machine and it
works great!    Maybe it's the dip switches though...

thanks
  Monty

  --------------------------------------------------------------

                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------


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

Q-mail expertise needed?

[Charles Crawford]

	Rather than boring everyone with the gory details, we are having quirky 
problems with Q-mail and ezlm on our ACB server.  We have some 65 megabytes 
of error messages or at least they appear to be, but we are not sure what 
they mean.  The two questions are first, is there anyone on the list who 
knows enough about this program to advise us and secondly, how hard should 
it be to simply port our mail to mailman and sendmail?

-- charlie.

Re: Q-mail expertise needed?

[William F. Acker WB2FLW +1-303-777-8123]

Hi,

     I'm pretty comfortable with Sendmail.  I haven't dug into mailman 
yet, but it shouldn't be too bad.  I think some folks on this list are 
using it,  Kirk, for example.



          HTH.
          Bill


On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Charles Crawford wrote:

> 	Rather than boring everyone with the gory details, we are having quirky 
> problems with Q-mail and ezlm on our ACB server.  We have some 65 megabytes 
> of error messages or at least they appear to be, but we are not sure what 
> they mean.  The two questions are first, is there anyone on the list who 
> knows enough about this program to advise us and secondly, how hard should 
> it be to simply port our mail to mailman and sendmail?
> 
> -- charlie.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

Re: Q-mail expertise needed?

[Ari Moisio]

Hi!

Charles Crawford 06.02.02:

  I maintain a couple of mail server on qmail and lists with modified
ezmlm. I'll like to see some of those error messages to see if i can
help

	Rather than boring everyone with the gory details, we
are having quirky
>problems with Q-mail and ezlm on our ACB server.  We have some 65 megabytes
>of error messages or at least they appear to be, but we are not sure what
>they mean.  The two questions are first, is there anyone on the list who
>knows enough about this program to advise us and secondly, how hard should
>it be to simply port our mail to mailman and sendmail?


-- 
Mr. Ari Moisio, Niittykatu 7, 41160 Tikkakoski, +358-40-5055239
ari.moisio@iki.fi http://www.iki.fi/arimo PGP-keyID: 0x3FAF0F05

Re: Q-mail expertise needed?

[Darrell Shandrow]

Hi Charles,

I have administered Qmail in the past, and currently administer 
Sendmail.  I also know how to admin Mailman.  Please let me know if you 
have resolved your issues with the ACB server.  If not, please send a 
private reply, and I'll be glad to help.

Thanks.

At 10:39 AM 2/6/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>         Rather than boring everyone with the gory details, we are having 
> quirky problems with Q-mail and ezlm on our ACB server.  We have some 65 
> megabytes of error messages or at least they appear to be, but we are not 
> sure what they mean.  The two questions are first, is there anyone on the 
> list who knows enough about this program to advise us and secondly, how 
> hard should it be to simply port our mail to mailman and sendmail?
>
>-- charlie.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Speakup mailing list
>Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
>http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Best regards and happy New Year,
Darrell
Access technology consulting / network and UNIX         systems administration.

Re: Speakup w/Accent-SA

[Monty Lilburn]

Hi Frank,

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Frank Carmickle wrote:
>
>If you disconnect your accent or turn it off for some reason just allow
>speakups buffer to fill up by using some review functions.  After a bit it
>will time out.  Then you can turn the accent on again and then press
>insert enter on the numpad.  This will reinitialize speakup.  However at
>the current time it doesn't check to see what the setting in /proc are so
>it will initialize back to the hardcoded defaults in the driver.

Strangely enough, when I followed your instructions to reset my Accent-SA
it also solved my problem of Speakup/Accent-SA  responding slowly to some
commands.  Basically after I was able to make speakup announce "Accent SA
reset" everything  was nice and quick!  Now if there was only a way to
make speakup reset the Accent at boot-up all would be good an
automatic...Still, this must be happening for a reason!

monty


                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------