Re: Good old Speakup

[Jookia <contact@jookia.org>]

Hi Martin,

speakup and espeakup don't conflict with orca, you can use them both at
the same time. :) Maybe try removing fenrir and seeing if things just
work?

Jookia.

On Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 12:49:30PM -0600, Martin McCormick wrote:
> Those of us who use screen readers have things we particularly
> like about them and stuff we dislike and a lot of that is
> totally subjective which makes the job of programming them even
> harder than simply coding.  I have used speakup or espeakup
> depending on the time period we are talking about since 2009 or
> thereabouts when I first got vinux to work and no longer had to
> use a MSDOS PC running kermit and feeding a hardware speech
> synthesizer so I know of what I speak.
> 
> 	I have a good and fast PC running debian bookworm with
> orca and the speech is good under orca but I always have wanted
> to have a pure command-line instance of old-school speakup for
> use in command-line stuff such as programming in c++, perl and
> shell scripts, PIC assembler and system administrative tasks.
> 
> 	There are at least 2 command line consoles that open text
> terminal windows on Control-Alt-F3 and Control-Alt-F4.  They
> don't talk so I installed fenrir and now, they talk but it's not
> what I was hoping for.
> 
> 	By pure accident/stupidity on my part, I once installed
> espeakup on here before finding out that that is not a good idea
> because espeakup is not a user-space application and uses kernel
> modules that might conflict with orca.
> 
> 	I forgot about the installation and have used orca a lot
> with no trouble but when i installed fenrir and got pipewire
> reconfigured to work with it, I was rudely reminded of espeakup
> which was a sleeping giant and awoke.  Both espeakup and fenrir
> would simultaneously speak screen output in the command consoles,
> each one at a different pitch and rate.  It was kind of amusing
> for about 15 seconds and then frustrating because the babble of
> the 2 voices, both e-speak but at different settings, tended to
> obscure what each was saying.
> 
> 	I worked on that issue on and off for a couple of days
> before another happy accident which clued me in on what happened.
> 
> 	I pressed the PrintScreen button and one of the voices
> said, "You killed speakup."  Pressing it again brought it back
> like normal.
> 
> 	So now I knew it was espeakup and fenrir having the
> babble battle.
> 
> 	I de-installed espeakup and fenrir now talks but it's not
> the same thing.  If you set punctuations to some, one must do
> that in the configuration file, then restart the service.  When
> you do that, the = sign is not one of the punctuation marks that
> is spoken, so much for programming.
> 
> 	Also, for some odd reason, Control-J (newline) and
> Control-K cause the screenreader to say "," as in the comma
> punctuation even there are no commas on the screen as near as i
> can tell.
> 
> 	That, alone drives me batty since it is confusing to say
> the least.
> 
> 	I am not trying to talk trash about fenrir because it's a
> good idea and there are things I like about the interface but oh,
> how I would like to just experience speakup in those command
> consoles.  It's easy to go through different punctuation levels
> and change speech rates on the fly plus, if one sets the
> punctuation to most, you do hear what one  needs to hear and that
> is important when programming and doing administrative tasks.
> 
> 	Any constructive ideas are appreciated.
> 
> 	Since espeakup did try to run, I have thought about
> putting it back as it never bothered orca while it was installed
> and then removing fenrir since both were trying to work at the
> same time.
> 
> Martin
>