[pulseaudio-discuss] Using pulseaudio with speakup

[Bill Cox]

I am trying to get Ubuntu/Lucid working well with applications for the
blind and visually impaired.  Orca is working quite well now with
pulseaudio.  The other critical application is speakup, which reads
text on the Ctrl+Alt+F1-6 consoles.  Speakup has issues with
pulseaudio, and I need some advice about working them out.

It is important, but not required, that speakup run before the user
logs in, so it can read the login prompt and some system messages.
Ideally, it does this with speechd-up which talks to speech-dispatcher
which generates speech through pulseadio.  Thus, once speakup starts,
it sounds like I need to somehow launch pulseaudio, as some user like
gdm.  When the user logs in, speechd-up needs to switch to talking to
that user's instance of pulseadio, so that speach from both the
console windows and Orca can stream through the same instance of
speech-dispatcher.  However, when I try this, the gdm version of
pulseaudio seems to grab the sound card, and the second instance is
mute.

The obvious solution is for me to just run one copy of pulseaudio (as
root?) at boot time and make all users access that copy, just like the
older sound systems.  However, I understand that is frowned upon by
the pulseaudio developers.

What is the right solution?  Remember, I need sound both before
logging in, and after, and they need to play nice, as the console
windows may not be logged in, while the Gnome desktop is.  I also
prefer sound from speakup to work as soon as the module is loaded.  I
understand the old system for doing this, but not how to make it work
with pulseaudio.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill