[Fedora-livecd-list] Espeak as default text to speech engine on LiveCD

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
Would it be possible for espeak to be made the default text to speech 
engine on the LiveCD?

Reasons for why making the change:
* At the moment the LiveCD comes with festival but this is slow in 
comparison to espeak. This means that for users of tools such as orca, 
the information presented is delayed and so makes the system appear 
unresponsive. This is particularly emphasised at points where orca may 
be slow to respond anyway (eg. if the system is under some load or focus 
is in a large and/or complicated GUI structure).
* Espeak comes with support for many languages where as festival is 
limited (I believe the LiveCD only has one language for festival).
* I believe espeak is more compact than festival. This is particularly 
true when considering the number of languages supported by espeak.
* Espeak seems to be more controllable than festival. I don't really 
notice any change in festival when I adjust the speech rate in orca, I 
do get a change with espeak. This is important as if the speech output 
is too fast for a user then they cannot understand it and so cannot use 
the system, if it is too slow this is frustrating as it makes the use of 
the system unnecessarily slow.

What is required for espeak to be used by orca? The two packages needed 
are espeak and gnome-speech-espeak. If the festival packages are removed 
then orca will use espeak by default, if festival is not removed then 
users can choose between the two.

I hope you will consider changing this on the LiveCD as it should 
improve the user experience for blind users.

Michael Whapples