pulseaudio and speech: performance issues

[A]

In fact I have always wondered why are blind people directed to
graphical user interfaces... I see the benefit for blind people to
have speech dispatcher working and use some of the available text
interfaces that can leverage it. Probably I have ignored a use case
like yours, Bill.

But anyways I see a little value in replacing MS windows with another
windows system + it is a very hard goal. The blind one needs a rock
solid synthesizer + a featurerich text interface that doesn't open new
windows and shows arbitrary messages in various parts of the screen.
All I see these general purpose screen readers do is get around the
graphical user interface rather than working with it. As well the
blind one has to do stupid things to get around the design of the
graphical application.
</uselessrant></offtopic>

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 6:59 AM, Bill Cox <waywardgeek at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree it's not as responsive as Windows with JAWs, for instance. ?I
> think I can hear a slight delay relative to the system I had setup
> with Ubuntu 9.10 using only alsa, and not pulseaudio, but I'm not
> sure. ?My vision is still reasonably good, and I don't think I'm able
> to hear the differences blind people hear. ?Also, my laptop is a
> quad-core Intel I7 architecture, which blows doors. ?Delays on other
> machines might be quite a bit worse.
>
> There is more tuning to be done. ?I simply found that with tlength set
> to 100, rather than a default of over 4000, that keys were spoken
> immediatly rather than buffered until I hit the next key. ?I think
> there are settings that effect latency, and I haven't tried them.
>
> That said, I suspect we're not going to get to the performance you're
> use to in Windows. ?I don't know all the details of what's in the way,
> but what I hear on Windows is quite impressive, and not quite matched
> yet in Linux, and I do think PulseAudio adds a barely perceptable (to
> me) delay. ?However, I find that I don't notice it unless I
> concentrate on it, and I feel the responsiveness is quite good while
> using it. ?Other issues tend to bother me more, though they are
> manageable, and far better than even six months ago. ?I have to
> restart Orca now and then, and about once a day, my Firefox crashes.
> I have the default Orca installed on my Karmic machine, though, and
> the latest for Lucid very likely continues progress towards stability.
>
> Bill
>
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