Questions[orca](ubuntu)

This should be a bug. But I don't know where I should report. It doesn't crash and I don't know which package this bug belongs to.

Here is the reproduce steps:

1. Login Ubuntu 24.04 Mate beta
2. Menu->Preferences->Assistive Technologies->Preferred Applications->check "Run at start" (below Orca Screen Reader)
3. Reboot
4. Screen Reader is not run at start and the item checked at step 2 is unchecked.

This issue affects all blind users. They need to start screen reader manually with shortcut SUPER+ALT+s at start.

I am assisting a blind friend with the transition from Windows to Linux. We have installed Ubuntu-MATE 18.04. Unfortunately, he hates the default voice used by Orca, and we have thus far been completely unable to change it. Our aim is to set it to use "Festival" to begin with because he can at least understand it easily.

Orca functions, but we are unable to change the voice being used. My understanding is that we should be able to change the "Speech System" option from "Speech Dispatcher" to "GNOME Speech Services". After this, we should be able to select "Festival" from the "Speech Synthesizer" options. This is based off this thread, where the exact same problem seems to have come up with no solution.

However, "GNOME Speech Services" does not appear in the "Speech Systems" options. This problem seems to be common, but so far I have not found a solution. The culprit appears to be installing libgnome-speech7 according to this thread.

When I try to install it, I get

nik@nik-P15F-v3:~$ sudo apt-get install -y libgnome-speech7
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libgnome-speech7

so it seems like this package does not exist for Ubuntu 18.04, and a search seems to confirm this.

Other commands I have run are:

sudo apt-get install festival
sudo apt-get install festvox-italp16k
sudo apt-get install festvox-itapc16k

All of these executed successfully, and I am able to open Festival from the terminal and get it to read text, so Festival is definitely installed on the machine. It is just not visible to Orca for whatever reason.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. While I am not blind, he has stated that the default voice on Orca is simply too bad for him to use for any serious length of time.

If this is a known issue that simply can not be fixed, any alternatives to Orca would be greatly appreciated.

The title may sound silly, but on Ubuntu 13.10, I'm getting frequent audible notifications using text to speech.

Is this the "speech dispatcher" and how can I disable it?

I accidentally opened Orca Screen Reader from the Dash when I was trying to open Screenshot. Now everything I type or click on is spoken out loud.

How do I make it stop?

For reference, here is a screenshot of Orca Screen Reader running:

I'm helping a friend of mine set up an Ubuntu environment for school, but he requires special software that reads things out loud because of his dyslexia. Now, I immediately knew that Orca should do just the job for this, but I'm particularly clueless about how to set it up. Right now, it just screams random things at me when opening windows, closing them, etc., when I just require it to speak (selected) text out loud. Preferably text from text editors and PDF files.

Is there any easy way to set it up accordingly? Because I've toyed around a lot, but haven't been able to get it to work just like I want it to. Help would be magnificent.