Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Hi all. We found a Double Talk in a closet in the Assistive Tech room, > and a Dectalk too but I doubt I could use that, as it only has what look > like 3.5 MM connector ports. We also found a Double Talk, with serial > and IO ports, and headphone connectors. I don’t know much about these > hardware synthesizers, but I’d love to use them with Emacspeak. so, any ideas? Hi. Chris Brannon here. If you want to use a hardware synthesizer with Emacspeak, you will be using a speech server written in tcl, not a kernel driver. Here's what I know. You said you found a Dectalk. Is it a Dectalk Express? They have three jacks: a headphone jack, a power jack, and something that looks a lot like an RJ-45 ethernet jack. Actually I think it is an RJ-45 jack, but it isn't ethernet. Instead, that RJ-45 jack is the device's serial port. You connect it to a PC using a cable that has an RJ-45 male plug on one end and an RJ-45 female to DB-9 female adapter on the other end. I'm going by memory; I'm pretty sure it's DB-9 female. Anyway, that's a special cable and adapter. I don't know where you'd find one nowadays. I used to have one, but I gave it to somebody on the Speakup list. If you do have a Dectalk Express with all the proper cabling, it works fine with Emacspeak, or at least, it did 10 years ago. In the servers/ subdirectory of the Emacspeak distribution, you'll find dtk-exp, which is what you want. There's also dtk-lite. It claims to interface to a "Dectalk Lite", but I don't believe I've ever seen one of those. I used to use dtk-exp back in the day, and it was fine. Just export DTK_PROGRAM=dtk-exp from your shell before starting Emacspeak. You may also need to export DTK_PORT=/dev/ttySx where ttySx corresponds to your serial port. E.G., export DTK_PORT=/dev/ttyS0 This even worked with USB-to-serial devices. E.G., export DTK_PORT=/dev/ttyUSB0. I think it defaults to /dev/ttyS0 if DTK_PORT is not set. As for the Doubletalk, you will need an additional package to work with it. Look for something called emacspeak-ss. If it is not packaged for your distro, then your search engine of choice is your friend. You could perhaps build it from source. I've never used a Doubletalk, so I can't say how well it worked. Hopefully someone on this list will jump in and correct me if I have given any incorrect info. Good luck! -- Chris _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list