On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote: > I dont see why the speech tools should be handled in any way different > from the other acessibility tools we ship: in that they are part of > the session. While I am no accessibility expert I am kinda sure that > on Fedora all accessibility stuff is run inside the user session and > the gdm pseudo-session so that the fully a11y features are available > both before and after the login. For reading consoles, we use speakup, which is a kernel module. With the speakup_soft kernel module, speakup makes the text to be spoken available through /dev/softsynth. There are two different popular packages for speaking the text read from from /dev/softsynth. The most popular is the least flexible, but blind users like that it almost always works: espeakup. It runs as root, reads from /dev/softsynth, and calls espeak to say the text. More powerful, but less popular is speechd-up, whierch reads from /dev/softsynth and forwards the text to a system-wide speech-dispatcher daemon. Speech-dispatcher enables the user to use many different voices for speech synthesis, not just espeak. We've got a new speech-dispatcher pulseaudio driver which works very well, but the system-wide speech-dispatcher daemon is causing problems. I can get it to use the gdm copy of pulseaudio, but since this copy of speech-dispatcher hangs around forever, and because I always need to be able to get speech from the consoles, it causes gdm's PA instance to hang around, makeing the audio card unavailable to user sessions. Colin and Luke have suggested using CK to deal with this, by killing off speech-dispatcher and speechd-up when the user logs in through gdm, and restarting it when they log out. However, I am not convinced we should be killing off the speech-dispatcher process for the consoles, ever. I might be persuaded, but I am very concerned that the audio from the consoles remain reliable. The blind use this, for example, to fix X11 problems we all run into sometimes. Bill
