[laptop-accessibility] How can the XO be made accessible to blind

[Mike Gorse]

Espeak needs OSS emulation if it is linked against Portaudio 18.  If it is 
linked against Portaudio 19, then it uses the native ALSA api.

I'm not sure which version the XO has.  If Portaudio 19 is being used, 
then a recent version from svn should be used or the speech server may 
lock up.  Until recently, portaudio was calling snd_pcm_drain when 
recovering from a xrun, and snd_pcm_drain can lock up if dmix is used 
(unless this was fixed very recently).  Portaudio 19 currently works 
around this by calling snd_pcm_drop instead of snd_pcm_drain.

-- Mike Gorse / AIM:linvortex / http://mgorse.freeshell.org --

On Sun, 30 Dec 2007, Duane King wrote:

> Espeak works fine, the XO just did not have the correct sound system config
> installed because somebody forgot to enable OSS emulation in ALSA.
>
> I hope you did not waste a lot of time editing the code for Espeak to get
> around this bug, I hope you did not edit it to make it pipe out sound data to
> be plaved via another utility, as espeak does all that by itself much faster,
> direct to the sound card without pipes, once the OSS sound system it requires
> is fully emulated in ALSA and it can use the required /dev/dsp and related
> file devices that it requires.
>
> I actualy files some bugs on this; Look for keyword 'espeak'.
>
> - Duane King