I still feel that reinitializing the synthesizer is an important feature to have. The Accent SA I'm using, if turned off and on, becomes extremely sluggish. That is, it takes like 5 to 10 seconds for it to respond to each keystroke. If it is turned off and back on, nothing in the world except a reboot will get it back. Of course, the obvious answer is not to turn it off, but then if the rate or speed get out of whack, you're right back to square 1. I will certainly give Chuck's suggestion a try and see if it solves the issue. On the subject of frames or windows, I didn't just want this to keep up with DOS and Windows screen readers. I was actually thinking of Lmme, the MSN Messenger clone, as well as CD players which have a track time that counts up continuously. Both of these would benefit from being able to silence a portion of the screen, and so would Pine, Tin, Lynx, and countless other curses-based applications which provide a status line. Of course, as Kirk said, it's a lot of work. I wasn't casting disrespect on Speakup because it isn't perfect. In fact, I have never seen any other screen reader that lets one hear speech from startup to shutdown and lets them even install an operating system from the ground up. With the high demand for software synthesis, I am greatly concerned that we will lose this feature when Speakup has to wait for sound card initialization before it can talk. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need software synthesis support because everybody would have hardware synthesizers and not have to watch their computer's performance go out the window because a software synthesizer is eating up memory and resources, and we wouldn't need a frames feature because all applications would have nice, screen-reader friendly interfaces. However, this is a sighted world and a screen reader's job, in my opinion, is to give a blind person the same access to the computer as the sighted user wherever practical. When we are forced to use an older version of an application because our screen reader hasn't caught up, this is not happening. That is one thing about Speakup that makes it stand above the Windows and DOS crowd. When it is discovered that a new Linux kernel breaks the Speakup patches, Kirk is out with a fix that not only gets Speakup working with the new kernel, but maintains backwards compatibility with older kernels as well. Well, sorry for the rant, but I really wanted to clear up what looked like a miss-understanding of my intent and explain where I am coming from. Adam
