pulseaudio and espeakup

[Jude DaShiell]

When I start running espeakup then run emacspeak or speechd-el and then 
return to espeakup the espeakup speech is trashed and barely 
understandable.  This all can happen on the text console with no need 
whatever to touch graphics interface.  Neither running any of the 
alternative screen readers like flite or festival helps this situation 
either.  For those with usb or serial or parallel speech synthesizers 
perhaps outsourcing some of this work to those synthesizers might help a 
little but that does nothing for those who only have a sound card.

On Sat, 30 Dec 2017, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2017 19:11:51
> From: Samuel Thibault <sthibault at debian.org>
> To: pkg-pulseaudio-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org
> Cc: debian-accessibility at lists.debian.org
> Subject: pulseaudio and espeakup
> Resent-Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:12:25 +0000 (UTC)
> Resent-From: debian-accessibility at lists.debian.org
> 
> Hello,
>
> Incompatibility between espeakup and pulseaudio is a recurring issue
> which AIUI has never actually been settled (or nobody took the time to
> implement a solution in Debian).
>
> This is a real pain for blind users, there are loads of reports that
> Debian/Ubuntu systems are not accessible, or accessible only in text
> mode, or accessible only in graphical mode, none of which is an
> acceptable situation.
>
> In summary:
>
> - espeakup is a speech synthesis for the in-kernel speakup screen
> reader.
>
> - espeakup runs as a background daemon which essentially reads
> /dev/softsynth and uses libespeak-ng to emit speech.
>
> - It can be made to run as non-root user by adding udev rules for
> /dev/softsynth to be accessible for it.
>
> - libespeak-ng is able to use pulseaudio
>
> BUT
>
> - currently espeakup runs as root, and then takes over the ALSA device.
> orca inside lightdm or gdm then can't emit its output (unless by luck
> espeakup didn't say anything at boot, and then pulseaudio inside the
> lightdm/gdm session manages to get the device, but then it's espeakup
> which can't get the device).
>
> - espeakup could be made to run as normal user, but then it seems its
> pulseaudio server can't access audio, I guess that's because consolekit
> doesn't consider it to be running "on the console"?
>
> - espeakup and lightdm/gdm could be given audio group access, but then
> there are two competing pulseaudio servers, and only the first one seems
> to actually manage to emit sound.
>
> In the end, I have no idea how this situation is supposed to work, and
> for now I have just made the espeakup d-i script *purge* pulseaudio,
> to get things working. Of course I can see various documentations
> saying one could use a system-mode daemon, but upstream doesn't want
> that. Normally, espeakup could have its own pulseaudio server, playing
> well along pulseaudio servers of other users, but I failed to get
> something working.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> We really need to fix this (and I'm really depressed that it seems
> nobody took the time to manage to work out a solution).
>
> Samuel
>
>

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