[raspberry-vi] Re: Progress
- From: Rill <starbasecafe@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 08:37:35 -0500
The work Mike is doing is awesome. It involves forking packages,
holding some back and basically turning the system inside out to make it
talk.
Using flite and eflite with emacspeak is interesting. Using alsa, I was
able to get emacspeak to say something, but this will be another work in
progress.
In exploring Adriane Knoppix a bit, we discovered it using a program
called sbl for console speech with espeak. Does anyone know anything
about this program or its creator. I could find little online. A lot of
Adriane seems to be done with smoke and mirrors under the covers.
I'm sending this from the pi, by the way.
Rill
On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 11:30:44AM +0000, Rodney Haynie wrote:
> So, so, so awesome Mike. And I have always loved the phrase "... than you can
> shake a stick at."
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mike Ray
> Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 9:42 PM
> To: raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [raspberry-vi] Progress
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
> --
> Michael A. Ray
> Analyst/Programmer
> Witley, Surrey, South-east UK
>
> The box said: 'install Windows XP, 7 or better'. So I installed Linux
>
> Interested in accessibility on the Raspberry Pi?
> Visit: http://www.raspberryvi.org/
>
> From where you can join our mailing list for visually-impaired Pi hackers
>
> ===========================================================
> The raspberry-vi mailing list
> Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/raspberry-vi
> Administrative contact: <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are trademarks of the Raspberry Pi
> Foundation.
>
> This list is not affiliated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the views and
> attitudes expressed by the subscribers to this list do not reflect those of
> the Foundation.
>
> Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013
>
> ===========================================================
> The raspberry-vi mailing list
> Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/raspberry-vi
> Administrative contact: <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are trademarks of the Raspberry Pi
> Foundation.
>
> This list is not affiliated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the views and
> attitudes expressed by the subscribers to this list do not reflect those of
> the Foundation.
>
> Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013
>
--
Rill.
Made on free software and sent from my Raspberry Pi powered by speech.
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and
attended to with diligence. Abigail Adams ( 1744 - 1818 ), 1780.
===========================================================
The raspberry-vi mailing list
Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/raspberry-vi
Administrative contact: <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are trademarks of the Raspberry Pi
Foundation.
This list is not affiliated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the views and
attitudes expressed by the subscribers to this list do not reflect those of the
Foundation.
Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013
Other related posts:
