OrcaPulseAudio

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Summary

Chart the accessibility implications and opportunities arising from Ubuntu using Pulse Audio. (Informational)

Rationale

Ubuntu is considering moving its audio-infrastructure to Pulse Audio. We should consider the effect this will have on speech synthesis and opportunities for improvements.

Use cases

  • Users of text-to-speech on Ubuntu with Pulse Audio.

Scope

  • Follow the implementation of Pulse Audio in Ubuntu from an accessibility perspective

BoF agenda and discussion

Pulse audio is a esound replacement compatable with esd and alsa. New features network support, better latency.

Most distros begining to standardise on pulseaudio instead of the myriad of sound servers available.

Existing applications should work with pulseaudio out of the box.

Latency should be better except maybe using esd compatable.

Screenreader using alsa would see no latency improvement from using alsa directly.

Pulse audio API is currently not stable.

Pausing other audio streams not possible since no way of communicated this over alsa.

Muting is possible.

Movie captions etc. could be sent to straight to pulse though it would be better to do through at-spi.

Proprietry tty engines mostly use oss. Development on a kernel module will improve oss compatability.

In summary orca does not need to change anything to work with pulseaudio but rigorous testing is required.


CategorySpec

Accessibility/Specs/OrcaPulseAudio (last edited 2008-08-06 16:16:05 by localhost)