I'm trying to narrow down where the problem is that causes the 1/2 second delay when Orca tries to read text using pulseaudio. Is it in pulseaudio's main code trunk, or in Ubuntu's version of pulseaudio? I have googled, but was unable to find a single instance where a blind user was able to get Orca working well with Pulse Audio, without the 1/2 second delay. I've also been able to convince myself that most of the issues listed on http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/UbuntuBugs are not causing the problem. In particular, I was able to run pulseaudio with nice -11 and rtprio 9, and the delay is still there. I haven't yet dealt with the out of date libcanberra. Do any of you know of any case where pulseaudio has been configured to deliver speech from Orca without the delay? Is this simply a problem now because Ubuntu was the version most blind users preferred before Ubuntu switched to pulseaudio? Has this problem been there forever? Thanks, Bill