Tried Pulse Audio Again--No Good For A11y

[Matthias Clasen]

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
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...

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...

> 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...

> 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.

> 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...

> 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.