[BRLTTY] Fwd: Problems when using brltty in the terminal

[Didier Spaier]

Le 09/05/2021 à 21:44, Christian Schoepplein a écrit :
> The only reason I am looking for a solution to get brltty with speech support up and running in the Mate text terminal is that I am looking for a good altnerative to have a system with full screen reader support for the text console and also for a graphical environment.
> 
> When I setup a new Debian for example I get a working Mate with speech and braille support, but I only get braille without speech support for the pure text console. If I like to enable speech support also for the text console, I have to do bad and ugly things to get it up and running.
> 
> This bad and ugly things would be not longer necessary, if the Mate terminal can be used like a pure text based working environment. Setting up such a system would also be easy for Linux beginners and things would run much more stable.
> 
> Ofcourse I could also configure my new Debian Bullseye system like I've configured thee other systems before, running pulseaudio as a systemwide daemon and do all those other stupid things to get speech in Mate and in the console, but if there is a a much better solution I'd like such a setup much more in future.

This issue comes from Debian default settings. In Slint that I maintain:
1. pulseaudio is only started on demand (when an application requires it)
2. pulseaudio is set to use the the dmix mixer, so ends all streams go 
to alsa
through via this mixer. From our /etc/pulse/default.pa:

### In Slint, we want to share audio resources between speech apps that
### rely on alsa and other apps that rely on pulseaudio.
load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix
load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

3. We include nothing in alsa configuration that redirect streams to 
pulseaudio.

All that not starting pulseaudio system wide.

Caveats:
1. I have been told that such a setting is not recommended. But nobody 
so far
    has been able to tell me why, and I have received zero complaint 
from users
    about it so far, as they get speech and braille in both console and 
graphical
    environments and can easily switch.
2. I have tried several times to convince Debian contributors to do 
something
    similar, to no avail. Maybe I didn't use the right channel?

Cheers,
Didier