Hi Martin, All: Fwiw, I also played around with fenrir some years ago. I quickly came home to Speakup. I do use Orca with Speech Dispatcher as well. My solution is to have two different audio devices, one for Speakup on the 23 consoles I open, and one for Orca/SD. I never succeeded trying to get either Speakup or Orca happy with pulseaudio, though. I haven't yet mucked around with what pipewire might offer as I'm waiting for it to settle down before doing that. Maybe it's pretty settled most recently. I just don't like software making decisions about what audio stream plays on what device. That's where I failed with pa. These days I run Arch as my Linux distro of choice and I tend to do a full system update about once a week. I do have one issue on boot that I solve by a very hokey work around. My process is as follows: Boot and log into the default console. Launch my vtconsole script that opens the remaining 23 consoles. As root (not sudo) run a loadkeys to get consoles 13-24 accessible. At that point I can start my orca environment with startx. But I don't auto start Orca, just the gui environment, because I need speech-dispatcher to take the correct device for output, and sd ignores my config setting for that. So the hokey work around is to start a wav playing on the device I want SD to stay away from and then start Orca. Works like a charm! Yes, yes. Amen to the sentiment of good old Speakup! Amen, and amen. Best, Janina Martin McCormick writes: > 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 -- Janina Sajka (she/her/hers) Accessibility Consultant https://linkedin.com/in/jsajka The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Co-Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures http://www.w3.org/wai/apa Linux Foundation Fellow https://www.linuxfoundation.org/board-of-directors-2/
