Help needed for system-wide pulseaudio for blind users

[Pia]

I don't know if this is of any help, but I reverted my Karmic install to 
using ALSA instead of Pulse Audio and then could get Speak Up to run just 
fine with other audio streams such as mp3 files.  I did this last night 
and so have not played with getting Orca up and running yet, but on a past 
Jaunty system I had, I remember that Orca didn't work either until I 
uninstalled pulseaudio and disabled it as well.  We shall see how hard it 
is to get Orca working with ALSA in Karmic.  I get the idea that your 
whole point though is to get speech to play correctly with Pulse Audio 
though instead of removing PA and using ALSA.  Am I correct?  Would the 
ALSA work around be a satisfactory solution for you?  I ask because it 
seems to be what has worked best for me on the systems I have tried to get 
talking recently.  That being said, there are plenty of things I have not 
played with yet, such as Lucid itself.

HTH,

Pia

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, Bill Cox wrote:

> I also posted this on the pulseaudio list, but there may be more help
> to be found here...
>
> I'm trying to build a Vinux (blind-user Linux distro) release based on
> Ubuntu/Lucid.  There's too much code to rewrite to have everything
> working the "right" way with pulseaudio by May, so I want to release
> Vinux/Ubuntu Lucid with the system-wide hack.
>
> I've enabled PA to start in system wide mode by editing
> /etc/defaults/pulseaudio, and enabling it there.  I've added gdm,
> root, speech-dispatcher, and my user name to the pulse-access group.
> Pulseaudio starts, and speech-dispatcher and speechd-up work with it
> just fine at boot.  Since this is a distro for the blind, I boot into
> a console, not gdm.  The login prompt is read nicely, as is text when
> I log in.  However, if I try to play a .wav file, there is no sound.
> None of the apps with PA back-ends will play sound for me.  When I
> type 'startx', Gome comes up, but the sound preference dialog tells me
> there's no sound card.  I suspect that rights to use it have been
> granted to the speech-dispatcher user, and I'm not able to access it.
>
> If there is anyone who can help me get such a settup working, I'd
> really appreciate it!
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
>
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