[raspberry-vi] Re: Progress
- From: Tirecias Engineer <tirecias.eng@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:53:55 -0500
Really great news Mike!
Thanks a lot.
El 04/08/2014 08:41 p.m., Mike Ray escribió:
> Hello list.
>
> You're all very quiet.
>
> I thought it was time to let you know how things are going here with
> efforts to get stuff going. So in order of significance, from high to low:
>
> I finally have speech-dispatcher running on both Raspbian and Arch Linux.
>
> I have taken a long time over this for three very good reasons:
>
> 1. Using the espeak synthesizer with the 'espeakup' program to connect
> speakup to espeak has proven to be unusable on the Pi.
>
> Despite trying very hard to get latency tweaks to stop the stuttering,
> still the speech is very poor with espeakup, and too much loading on the
> latency, while it smooths the voice a bit, also produces a sluggish and
> unresponsive keyboard.
>
> 2. And this is the most compelling reason to use speech-dispatcher; if
> I am to get Orca running in LXDE, or some other X Windows configuration,
> we need speech-dispatcher to be running, because Orca needs it.
>
> 3. It took ages to get it to work :(. Open Source is fantastic but
> documentation is thin on the ground. Often it is a case of just
> chucking stuff at a wall until something sticks.
>
> Now a problem...pulseaudio. The default configuration of
> speech-dispatcher is to use pulseaudio, which I hate with a passion.
> And what's more I could not get pulseaudio to run reliably and it
> constantly crashes.
>
> ALSA? Well...I was using ALSA originally, but ALSA is not good with
> more than one audio stream at a time, so listening to a screen-reader
> while listening to streamed music might make the Pi choke a bit. Not
> that I am encouraging you to run more than a couple of things in one go,
> poor little Pi.
>
> Then Rill and I were looking at Knoppix. This is a flavour of Linux,
> not running on the Pi currently, that has some accessible variants,
> notably something called Adriane. Anyway while we were playing with
> Knoppix I noticed that it uses speech-dispatcher configured using an
> audio library called libao. Don't ask me what the 'ao' bit is, 'audio
> output' maybe?
>
> Anyway now I have speech-dispatcher running on both Raspbian and Arch
> with libao, and......drum roll....ABSOLUTELY NO stuttering!!
>
> I have had to do some tweaking of the program 'speechd-up', a program
> which connects speakup to speech-dispatcher. For example speakup was
> saying 'capital' all the time for capital letters until I hacked the
> source of speechd-up and stopped it.
>
> I also made some other interesting discoveries about speech-dispatcher
> that I could not find documented anywhere. Among these are:
>
> 1. Just commenting out a 'AddModule' directive in the config file does
> NOT stop sd loading it. The actual module has also to be removed from
> the module path, and not just renamed, otherwise sd recognises it as a
> module and loads it anyway.
>
> And also because of the stuff with triplets in path names (like
> '/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf', where the 'arm-linux-gnueabihf' bit is
> called a triplet), sd gets very confused aboute paths to modules and
> libao plugins. I could have hacked the Makefiles to solve this but it
> was easier to just make soft links to simulate the right paths.
>
> speech-dispatcher and the espeak API. Like a lot of the programs that
> call espeak, sd does not implement the full espeak API, although it does
> better than most. So I have been able to make some tweaks to things
> like sample-rate and buffer size in the espeak.conf file of sd.
>
> Incidentally using sd I have been able to reverse the latency tweaks I
> made to the espeak source while we were trying to use espeakup.
>
> One problem that remains is that Emacspeak is still stuttering. This is
> because Emacspeak does not use speech-dispatcher, but the espeak server
> that it uses interfaces directly to espeak. I am looking into writing
> an 'Emacspeak to speech-dispatcher' connector.
>
> All this effort has meant I have been writing SD cards faster than I can
> eat chocolate, and that's fast. Infact I have busted two SD cards in
> the process. The little plastic combs between the gold contacts have
> come away and sprung up. Rather than risk damaging the delicate card
> slot on a Pi, or leaving small fragments of plastic in the card slot in
> my screamingly fast desktop Linux machine, I threw these cards away. I
> have now switched to using the little metal micro-SD to SD adaptors, on
> the grounds that these will not break.
>
> Because I have been configuring and reconfiguring the Pi so much, I have
> written a mechanism which will run a series of scripts one after the
> other. These scripts can be grouped into collections which reflect what
> I am trying to achieve.
>
> The mechanism which runs these scripts I am calling my 'sausage
> machine', for reasons which should be obvious, and the individual script
> packages I am calling 'sausage packs'.
>
> I have packs for:
>
> Arch Linux using speech-dispatcher and libao
> Arch Linux using espeakup
> Raspbian using speech-dispatcher and libao
> Raspbian using speech-dispatcher and ALSA
> Raspbian using speech-dispatcher and installing Orca on LXDE.
>
> and some others. Some packs run after others. For example the one
> which configures Arch for console speech can be followed by one which
> installs LXDE and Orca etc.
>
> Now we have had Orca speaking on Raspbian and LXDE a couple of times,
> with help from Rill's young sighted friend Morgan. But I have taken a
> step back from that to get speech-dispatcher running solidly on both
> Raspbian and Arch.
>
> Now we have that, with Rill's continueing help, I can go back to trying
> to get Orca up and running and speaking immediately you type 'startx' to
> go into X.
>
> So far we have done this with LXDE for a couple of reasons:
>
> 1. Raspbian already has LXDE installed so it should be a matter of just
> uninstalling inaccessible apps when we have Orca speaking.
>
> 2. Wikipaedia has a page comparing desktop environments and LXDE comes
> out on top as the leanest. And after all, if it says that on
> Wikipaedia, it must be true, huh?
>
> 3. Because both Raspbian and Knoppix use LXDE I have some reference
> systems to look at.
>
> 4. The OpenBox window manager that Raspbian uses is very flexible for
> use of the keyboard, e.g. not using the mouse.
>
> So...after a lot of rambling, a summary:
>
> I am about to unleash Arch Linux onto Rill to see if she can break it,
> before I release it on the site for download. When I release it on the
> site it is likely to come without Emacspeak initially, until I can get
> the Emacspeak to speech-dispatcher connector written.
>
> Then with that done, I will get back to getting Orca running
> out-of-the-box on Raspbian.
>
> I am beginning to think that given a couple of more weeks or so we can
> see a few different images up on the web site for download, including
> some which are talking GUIs.
>
> And within a couple of months or so, more accessible images than you can
> shake a stick at.
>
> Mike
>
>
>
>
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