Tried Pulse Audio Again--No Good For A11y

[Janina Sajka]

Matthias Clasen writes:
> On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 14:34 -0400, Janina Sajka wrote:
> > I just decided to give pa another go--so that I could speak from recent
> > experience. I went to my /etc/alsa/alsa.conf and uncommented line 11.
> > Then, I rebooted.
> > 
> > 1.)	There continues to be no audio indication of when gdm is ready.
> > This despite the fact that I have "SoundOnLogin=true" in my
> > /etc/gdm/custom.conf. The builtin GDM "audio icon" doesn't play, neither
> > does GDM beep when it launches, nor can I get a beep from pressing
> > back-space.
> 
> What is the 'builtin audio icon' ? I have no idea what you are talking

The sound the GDM plays when you've enabled audio. It plays after login,
which is nice. But that doesn't meet the user need to know when GDM is
ready for use.

I suspect no one thought to give this feature a name. If they did, I
haven't heard it. Typically a Marketing Dept would call such a thing a
"audio logo." Think of the sound that accompanies Intel's "Intel Inside"
commercials.

> about here. And I've explained months ago how you can get a sound when
> the login screen appears - assuming you are willing to make simple
> customizations, which seems to be the case, considering that you are
> editing alsa.conf...

Sorry, I don't recall that--nor can I find it in my mailboxes or via
Google. I do see an extended conversation on gdm-list that included both
of us. Looking at that mail I see that I reported this sound would play
after a Ctrl+Alt+Backspace--but not on boot. That continues to be the
case.

> 
> Why do you expect to get a beep from pressing backspace ? You can get
> beeps in all sorts of ways: pressing up arrow, pressing enter, followed
> by backspace, etc...
> 
I don't necessarily. Again, the user need is to know when GDM is ready
for login. A beep on backspace is one way to achieve that. It was the
old behavior when "SoundOnLogin=TRUE"

> > 2.)	Ctrl-S does not work in GDM. This is gdm-2.22.0-8.fc9. Should I
> > try from rawhide?
> 
> Yeah, I know we wanted to add such global hotkeys to
> gnome-settings-daemon, but it hasn't happened, as far as I can see. I'll
> try to find out where that stands. But this is not very related to
> pulseaudio anyway...

OK. Thank you. Ctrl+s to start Orca with speech, Ctrl+b to start it with
braille, and ctrl+m to start it with magnification are certainly
noncontroversial. We discussed additional, mouse-oriented a11y for users
of Gok on gdm-list. I don't believe we came to conclusions.
> 
> > 3.)	Logging in I hear first the GDM "audio logo," think I'll call it
> > an earcon from now on. But, Orca launches in my secondary audio device.
> > That's inappropriate, but I have no way to control that except to unplug
> > my secondary and tertiary audio devices and start over.
> 
> Hardly pulseaudios fault if orca picks the wrong device. I have no idea
> how orca decides which device to use.

Orca makes no decisions about audio devices. Neither does gnome-speech.
So, it's rather an uncontrolled hand-wave.

> > 4.)	Logging back in with only one audio device on board, Orca does
> > indeed startup on that device--but it seems I have to choose between
> > Orca and playing other audio. How quaint! I thought we got past this
> > silly "one sound at a time" view back around alsa-0.9. Does anyone
> > recall the alsa FAQ used to claim this was appropriate back then?
> 
> I don't recall old alsa FAQs, but you can observe that all the rest of 
> the desktop happily shares the output device under pulseaudios control.
> You'd think it should be possible for orca to do the same. That it is
> not doing so is again not pulseaudios fault...

Perhaps not, but commenting and uncomment line 11 in
/etc/alsa/alsa.conf--the line that invokes (or blocks) pulse audio
toggles this between broken and correct functionality. What else am I to
conclude about pulse audio?

> 
> > 5.)	While I paplay, I try to go Ctrl-Alt-F1. While I'm not prevented
> > from doing so, paplay believes it should pause playing while I'm away
> > from the gui tty. Now, who's the genius that figured out this "feature?"
> 
> Insults won't help your cause. 
Well, my apologies if this offends you. Is it supposed to work that way,
though? Is there actually a use case for that behavior? Or is this just
some incidental artifact?

Janina

> 
> 
> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.202.595.7777;	sip:janina at a11y.org
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

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Chair, Open Accessibility	janina at a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org