Switching Qs: Sequencers, Colors, HW Compatibility

[Luke Yelavich]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 10:30:32PM EST, Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
> It's been ages since I've posted here. In brief I planned doing GTK plus 2 
> development under VmWare but found out that the Cygwin console and my 
> Windows based AT was a much easier route at this point. Now I just popped in 
> the Edgy live CD in my main music machine and wonder of wonders it came up 
> with Orca right after the boot. This is the first time a LInux distro has 
> recognized my TerraTec EWS88 MT soundcard. I recall how tough getting 
> Gnopernicus speaking was back in RedHat so things have certainly advanced a 
> whole lot.

They certainly have. However, since you are using such a high-end sound 
card, you may have problems with synthesized speech, since it is played 
at lower sample rates, and I have found with my envy24 based hardware, 
it takes a while for audio to be heard.

> 1. Is eSpeak already included in Edgy and if it is how do I enable Finnish 
> support and also make it show in the Orca list of speech synths? Being a GUI 
> guy at heart, I do hope we'll get graphical means of adding speech synths 
> some day. I vaguely recall it was about editing some text file for a generic 
> speech synth driver.

Espeak is unfortunately not on the Live CD. It is in the universe 
repository, which needs to be enabled once the distribution is 
installed. It is not very easy to get it working with Orca either, due 
to other components having also to be isntalled, and configuration can 
sometimes get messy.

Espeak's performance with orca in this manor is unfortunatley not that 
great either.

> eSpeak is extremely important to me as without Finnish support I have to 
> return to the MS monster to read my mail, argh. Also I do hope Orca has a 
> shortcut for switching the language in which Screen text is being read as I 
> alternate between Finnish and US English quite often, especially in e-mail 
> and the Web.

If you really wish to take the espeak route, I can walk you through it.

> 2. Is there a decent, accessible MIDI sequencer for Gnome out there? NOthing 
> fancy, multiple tracks, event list, quantize with a strength parameter and 
> the ability to support several hardware MIDi synths with instrument names 
> would be good enough. A friend of mine whose a long-time LInux user told me 
> about the upcoming Ubuntu Studio and that Ardour 2 will have MIDI and is 
> GTK+ based. I might be better off waiting for the Studio to come out for an 
> easier time with music making.

Unfortunately, there isn't. While there are some great Linux audio apps, 
accessibility is not their strong point. There is one GTK sequencer 
called Seq24, but without having tried it myself, I can't say how 
accessible it is.

> 3. I use a combo of speech, braille and magnification to manage. There are a 
> couple of questions I have regarding the visuals. firstly, how should I set 
> up the magnifier screen coordinates in Orca to get a wide, rectangular 
> window at the bottom of the screen similar to a docked Microsoft Magnifier, 
> if you will. By default the magnifier takes all too much space in my 
> opinion.

Orca should have options in its preferences for adjusting magnification 
settings.

> Secondly, and this is a long pet-pieve of mine, is there still no graphical 
> way of seting up the colors in a Gnome theme? I like how KDE does it 
> immensly but too bad QT4 support isn't mainstream just yet. I've tried a 
> couple of times to find out official docs or an easy tutorial of how the 
> theme files need to be modified to simply change some of the background 
> colors but haven't been succesful so far.

I'll have to leave this question to be answered by those more 
knowledgable about how GNOME themes are created. Daniel, anybody else?

> 4. Finally, how do I determin for sure whether a piece of hardware is 
> compatible with Ubuntu. I.e. is there an official hardware compatibility 
> list? I tried looking at the detected hardware in the Gnome device manager 
> but when I move in the tree control it updates extremely slowly as it 
> probably probes the devices on focus change. The update takes several 
> seconds during which the whole tree becomes white, i.e. an invalid client 
> area in MS Lingo I suppose. Also when I tab around the dialog, it says 
> unknown or something along those lines for the text fields that are 
> describing the currently selected device on the right.

I think there is, but once again, I will have to defer to others to 
point to it.

> In particular, I'd need to be sure that my M-Audio (formerly MIDIman) USB 
> MIDI Sport 4x4 as well as its 1x1 counter part do work in Linux. If they 
> don't, that means no music making in Linux as I rely on hardware synths and 
> analog mixing mostly. I might get some particularly LInux compliant hardware 
> for my next machine but not for this old one. The last time I asked about 
> the MIDI Sports, which was a couple of years back, the 2x2 model was 
> supported but 4x4 was not.

I am pretty sure that the MIDI controller is supported, but you can go 
to the ALSA website, http://www.alsa-project.org, and look for the 
soundcard matrix. You can look it up there.

> Any help or advice greatly appreciated.

I hope I have been of some help. If you have any more questions, pleaes 
don't hesitate to email the list, and someone will attempt to answer 
your questions when they can.
-- 
Luke Yelavich
GPG key: 0xD06320CE 
	 (http://www.themuso.com/themuso-gpg-key.txt)
Email & MSN: themuso at themuso.com
Jabber: themuso at jabber.org.au
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-accessibility/attachments/20070215/174eddb3/attachment.sig>