[BRLTTY] issues with the espeak speech driver

[kendell clark]

hi
Actually, I'm not sure what happened. It just started speaking. The
problem is that the espeak voice it's using isn't naturally monotonic.
It's using the default voice, which is more expressive than brltty is
making it. But that might just be a matter of supplying the right
parameters to it. Would it be possible to have brltty use the system
locale to determine the espeak voice to use? For example, if the system
were set to US english, it would use the us english voice to speak?
That's about all the customization I need, that way if a user changes
the system language brltty would automatically switch over to that
language. My main problem right now is that brltty isn't speaking the
log in screen or typed characters, or indeed anything after it speaks
it's version. I'm building a test image now and will check systemd to
see if brltty is crashing or failing somehow.
Thanks
Kendell Clark


Dave Mielke wrote:
> [quoted lines by kendell clark on 2016/05/30 at 00:53 -0500]
>
>> I'm getting somewhere in my quest to integrate brltty into the sonar
>> linux distro. It now speaks on the live image. 
> What did you do to get that far?
>
>> The problem is, the speech is very monotone, 
> Maybe that's just a matter of getting the right options through to it. Brltty's 
> speech drivers do support driver-specific parameters, so, as needed, we could 
> add support for whichever eSpeak options you need.
>
> Perhaps you could experiment with the espeak command in order to figure out 
> which options achieve your goal.
>
> How monotonic or expressive a voice is is probably a user taste issue, and 
> different for everyone. Speaking for myself: When I was experimenting with 
> voices for my cell phone (I'm strictly braille on my computer), I found that I 
> much prefer a monotonic voice for at least two reasons. The first is that it 
> doesn't impose potentially wrong emotions on whatever it's telling me. The 
> second, and perhaps more important, is that I find it much better when it comes 
> to accurately hearing short phrases and/or tecnical information.
>
>> and it only speaks long enough to speak it's version. After this, it no longer 
>> speaks anything else. I'm wondering if there may be an issue with the espeak 
>> speech driver? 
> Try logging with -ldebug,speech (and, of course, -L/path/to/logfile) to see if 
> that reveals anything.
>
>> I'm also not sure how to navigate the screen with brltty. Do the numberpad 
>> keys navigate by line, character and word? I use the keypad keyboard table. 
> Check out: http://brltty.com/doc/KeyBindings/kbd-keypad.html
>
> Specifically for speech navigation, have a look at all of the bindings that are 
> KPPlus+something.
>