Since I didn't get much response with my more polite e-mail, here's what I really think, given my current ignorance about pulseaudio... PulseAudio is cool, but I fear it's over-engineered by some Ph.D's with too much elegance in their solution, and not enough real world experience. Run as user? Really? If you think you've got a good reason to do this, is it more important than sacraficing accessibility for the blind? The worst disaster for accessibility for the blind and visually impaired has been adoption of PulseAduio by the major distros. I'm personally spending insane hours trying to fix this mess, and frankly I could use some direction. We've got Orca mostly working now, but the other essential app - speakup - is still in limbo. Now the blind community has no pull. We can't tell Ubuntu to run PulseAudio as a normal deamon. As a result, our computers come up talking but then can't talk once the user logs into gnome. This is because speakup launches a process that starts pulseaudio as the gdm user, and since that process continues forever, the gdm copy of pulseaudio never dies, and the user's gnome session gets no access to the sound card, and Orca wont talk. I just need a solution. I'm frankly hoping to get more response to this more emotional e-mail than my previous polite one. I promise to be nice once I'm convinced we're not actually letting a bunch of inexperienced coders undermine the Linux sound system, which is likely to happen once I'm no longer ignorant of what the heck this user-land stuff is all about, and when I learn how to write code that gives the blind speach on their Ctrl+Alt+F1 consoles from boot, as well as after they login. You know what it's like trying to help a blind user through e-mail to figure out what to do when the computer just stops talking? Ever try to explain to a user over the phone how to use a graphical application? It's much worse than that. The sound system needs to work at boot, when we log in, and in fact all the time. Is that too much to ask? That's what I require from Ubunut/Lucid. I'm willing to write the code to make it happen. Can anyone please advise me on what code needs to be written to get speakup and Orca to both work with pulseaudio, from boot, after logging into gnome, and on the console windows? Bill
