[pulseaudio-discuss] Proper PulseAudio use on accessible computers?

[Milan Zamazal]

>>>>> "LP" == Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> writes:

    LP> On Fedora, our current plan is to start PA and other user
    LP> daemons (such as nm-applet) inside of the gdm
    LP> pseudo-session. Each active session has a PA daemon of its own,
    LP> and gdm too, and everytime you switch the session/gdm-screen a
    LP> different becomes active and all others give up access to the
    LP> devices. We think that audio devices are better not shared
    LP> between sessions, a lot similar to other input/output devices,
    LP> like keyboards, mice and screens.

OK.

    LP> Audio on the raw console hasn't really been a priority for me. I
    LP> do acknowledge though that it should be a priority to make a11y
    LP> work.

I personally don't think it's that important, there are less and less
reasons to use consoles at all today (except special cases like booting,
some breakdown situations, etc.).  Just when one needs to use console,
it's important to be able to get the speech output some way.  But this
should be manageable using the methods similar to what you've outlined.

    LP> What exactly does this Speex Dispatcher do? From what you wrote
    LP> above, I got the impression that you do require the ability to
    LP> continue streaming while the foreground VT is changed from the
    LP> gdm one to the newly created session? 

Not necessarily.  It can probably be solved by starting new Speech
Dispatcher (user specific) instance right after new PulseAudio instance
is started.  By first testing it seems such a setup works.  I just
needed to know whether this is the right/recommended way of doing
things.

    LP> Playing uninterrupted sounds when the active session changes is
    LP> simply not possible right now. However, I already spent a bit of
    LP> time thinking about it since eventually we might want to add
    LP> some "woosh" sound effect like MacOS X, when the session is
    LP> switched. But that's not really on my todo list right now.

Such a feature might be useful, but it's probably not very important for
the purpose.

Thank you for answer and clarification.

Regards,

Milan Zamazal