Re: Debian with Orca

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Hi,

I happen to have Debian 12 Bookworm installed in a Qemu virtual machine, so
tried, using lightdm as login manager and mate as desktop.

Orca was already installed, but not started in mate

>From mate-terminal I could install espeakup typing as root:
apt-get install espeakup.

Then as advised edited /etc/modules to include a line with:
speakup_soft

I did not edit /etc/default/espeakup as in this VM there is only one virtual
sound card and did not care for which voice to use.

Then switching to tty2 pressing ctrl-alt-f2 did indeed make espeakup talking in
this console.

But if I start Orca in mate-terminal I can't get speech in the text console.

This reminds me a discussion I had with Samuel long ago: as is a default setting
in Slint I suggested to also include in Debian a line like this in
/etc/pulse/default.pa to redirect the pulse's output stream to alsa's mixer,
thus avoiding that both pulse and alsa claim the same card:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix


This was not accepted for some reason that I do not recall exactly.

However you could instead try to use one of the other screenreaders as stated in
the Debian wiki. Caveat: I did not try these other methods.

Cheers,
Didier

Le 08/10/2023 à 15:37, Linux for blind general discussion a écrit :
>     In order to have speech in the text consoles, you need to make sure Speakup
> or BRLTTY or another screenreader is active.  It works just fine with Speakup. 
> You may want to read the Debian accessibility FAQ.
> 
> This is the section on Speech support.
> 
> https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Speech_Support
> 
> ORCA will be on console 7 by default, and you can easily switch to a text
> console and have both working at the same time.
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/7/2023 1:54 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
>> In a seemingly endless trek to get both Windows 11 and debian
>> Linux from a 3-year-old laptop I recently acquired, I had been
>> trying to install debian Linux with orca on to a large-capacity
>> thumb drive.  The debian bullseye installs were taking as long as
>> twelve hours or so to do and when I finally got one to finish, it
>> was as slow as molasses in January or the same thing in July in
>> the Southern hemisphere and was completely useless except for ssh
>> logins from another computer using the command-line or console
>> mode.
>>
>>     Orca never did anything except an occasional halting
>> error message.
>>
>>     Finally, I took a one-terabyte Crucial (Brand name) usb
>> drive and decided to try that.  The twelve-hour marathon reduced
>> to less than an hour and the orca installation is talking as well
>> as it does on a desktop system, here.  The real problem was the
>> slowness of data transfer in and out of the usb thumb drive.  The
>> orca screen reader and mate terminal are responding nicely and fast
>> and all seems well so far.
>>
>>     Now for some questions:
>>
>>     I am not new to orca but, in the couple of years I have
>> been trying it on the desktop and now, the laptop, I really miss
>> having a command-line console which I can get with no problem if
>> I ssh in to either orca system with a command-line Linux box.
>>
>>     This is the standard debian install installation image
>> one can download and it found the laptop sound interface without
>> any special measures such as installing a usb sound card .  On
>> some systems, you do get command-line consoles by pressing Control+Alt+F2
>> and you can go back to the GUI by Control+Alt+f1.  I think there are
>> maybe 5 more command-line consoles in which speakup talks.  On
>> this installation, Control+Alt+f2 prompts one to type a command or ESC to
>> exit.  One of the other just kills speech and nothing much seems
>> to happen.  Like the spoiled rich kid on Christmas morning, I
>> want it all but not in a nasty way so I am not complaining.  If
>> necessary, I could get another hopefully fast usb drive and
>> install debian without the GUI and get the consoles but since this
>> is a laptop, every extra piece of gear makes it less portable.
>> Also, Every instance of Linux one makes will have a different ssh
>> host key unless one copies the same key to all instances.
>> Otherwise the systems you are using ssh to talk to think
>> something's wrong when they see the different host keys.
>>
>>     I would also like to say some good words about slint.  I
>> was able to get a command-line set of consoles but the only way I
>> could get anything to talk was to plug in a usb sound card.  One
>> such card was a Creative Labs SoundBlaster series usb sound card
>> which worked perfectly for the speakup voice plus I also tried
>> another very inexpensive sound card which also worked with no
>> difference between the Creative Labs and the sound card whose
>> name escapes me, but slint couldn't automatically find this
>> laptop's built-in sound card.
>>
>>     Everything else in slint that I tried appears to have no
>> problems .
>>
>>     Sound system hardware is so proprietary that audio issues
>> in Linux are like grains of sand on the beach, common and gritty
>> when you have to deal with them.
>>
>>     So, my primary question is am I missing something about
>> the command consoles?  The mate terminal seems to be working but
>> it's not quite the same as a command-line console.
>>
>> Martin

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