[pulseaudio-discuss] Unacceptable delay in pulseaudio continues in Lucid

[Bill Cox]

Blind/VI users of Ubuntu Jaunty, Karmic, and now Lucid alpha1 find
their linux machine close to unusable.  The reason is that there is
about a 1/2 second delay between pressing a key and hearing any
feedback.  As a result 100% of blind/VI users who use Ubuntu as their
primary machine disable pulseaudio.  There are no exceptions.  No
blind person has, or ever will use a machine full time with such poor
audio performance.  When disabled, there is no perceptible delay, and
key and word echo work as expected.

There are a few of us who would like to figure out how to get
pulseaudio working properly in Ubuntu.  There is another camp that
wants to abandon Ubuntu completely, and switch to Debian, primarily
because of the pulseaudio delay issue.  The primary linux distro for
the blind/VI community, Vinux, has switched from Ubuntu to Debian.

So, my questions are:

Does anyone here know how to begin debugging the 1/2 second delay
problem?  Is this something that as a volunteer debugger I might
expect to get fixed in time for the Ubuntu Lucid release, or should I
continue with the other developers in finding workarounds to bugs
caused when pulseaudio is disabled?  Is a 1/2 second delay inherent in
pulseaudio, and can't be fixed?  We have to get pulseaudio working
with older applications, too, like IBM's TTS engine for which we only
have binary.

I filed a bug on this at Ubuntu back in November, but there is no
progress so far:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/468677

If it is not possible to fix the 1/2 delay problem, I'll have to work
with others to develop pulseaudio-free versions of Ubuntu.

Thanks,
Bill