Marian Selea writes: > Tim is right! Had the same issue and it has been addressed as described. > Good luck! Thanks to each of you. I'll give it a try this evening and also have my wife watch the screen if it doesn't come up talking at that point. All indications on the laptop are that it isn't just locking up or anything like that. One thing I do know from the oralux distribution that is on there now is that the sound card appears to have only one channel. If one is playing an audio file, speakup is silent. If speakup is speaking, you can't play audio from anything else. You get a "device busy" indication. So how, you might ask, does one play audio? You can turn off speakup and play audio or you can do something like sleep 1;aplay audiofile.wav The ability to get speech simultaneously with playing audio appears to be a function of the sound driver for the sound card. My Debian system at work has a SB Live card and will play several sound streams at once including festival while something else is playing. My Debian systems at home are running the stock Dell sound chip set which is, I seem to recall, something like a CS4231. All are using alsa drivers and those systems permit only one stream at a time. This could, depending upon the way the speech engine in Orca works, keep the ubuntu screen reader from getting control of the card. Martin _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list