Ok Linux people.

[fireborn@dragonscave.space]

@stevenscott What distribution are you using, and on what hardware?

[2qx@mastodon.social]

@stevenscott

Distro hopping is the "turning it off and turning it on again" of linux.

https://zendalona.com/accessible-coconut/

There is also the espeak command which works from the command line.

[closeted_unionist@mastodon.social]

@stevenscott You gotta sacrifice 3 chickens and a goat; and chant our dark mantra 5x, "I use arch btw" /s

[icewolf@masto.brightfur.net]

@stevenscott Silly question but I don't think anything explained it anywhere to us: Have you logged out and back in? I think sometimes Orca doesn't pick up on stuff that was running before it was started. Might be worth trying.

[icewolf@masto.brightfur.net]

@stevenscott (disclaimer: we're not blind and I barely know how to use Orca. The most we've used it for is very basic fumbling-around screenreader testing stuff. I have no idea how the navigation system works, or on any screenreader for that matter.)

[mobidic@mastodon.social]

@stevenscott

This usually points to the speech backend stopping, not Orca itself. The most common culprit is Speech Dispatcher.

Run this first (Terminal):
systemctl --user restart speech-dispatcher
orca --replace

Then test Orca again.

If it still speaks for only a few seconds, send the output of (Terminal):
systemctl --user status speech-dispatcher --no-pager

That will show whether the speech service is crashing, disabled, or failing to connect.

[semitones@tiny.tilde.website]

@stevenscott if you run it from the terminal, does it give you any useful error messages that you can search?

Edit: I should have waited for "load more replies" to appear, and pushed that, and read things, before asking my question. Freely disregard

[kekunplazas@mamot.fr]

@stevenscott Ah it happened to me, I never understood how and why.

[barrionomia@mastodon.social]

@closeted_unionist @stevenscott hahaha

[audio@social.zooey.cc]

depending on your os and desktop environment it may just not work. i remember when i used arch with kde it only worked well in the terminal. otherwise it did just what you're describing. now i'm on debian with bspwm and it works perfectly (or at least as perfectly as orca tends to work)

[randamumaki@mstdn.social]

@stevenscott I don't know. I'm a sighted linux user and have never gotten orca to work properly.

This is one of the things #Linux really needs to do better on. A lot better.

#Accessibility

[stevenscott@tweesecake.social]

So thanks to Claude Code I was able to get it to install Orca, update the distribution and install Piper TTS so we are at least functional. The rest is a steep learning curve!

[serrebi@serrebiradio.com]

@stevenscott What distribution are you using that you didn't have talkback?