Ubuntu's switch to pulseaudio broke accessibility for the blind.

[Darxus]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

The switch to pulseaudio has made screen readers, on which the blind depend, unintelligible.

The recommended workarounds are, in this order:
* aptitude remove pulseaudio
* touch ~/.pulse_a11y_nostart
* Use orca with pulseaudio via speech-dispatcher: http://live.gnome.org/Orca/UbuntuJaunty

The problem appears to revolve around pulseaudio's lack of support for mmap, and libportaudio's dependancy on it:

$ LIBASOUND_DEBUG=1 espeak "This is a test."
ALSA ERROR hw_params: set (ACCESS)
           value = MMAP_INTERLEAVED : Invalid argument
...

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04

$ apt-cache policy pulseaudio
pulseaudio:
  Installed: 1:0.9.14-0ubuntu20.2

[Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131)]

Removing pulseaudio will break important stuff (like your sound preferences) in Ubuntu 9.10. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-media/+bug/400973

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

This should no longer be a problem from jaunty onwards, at least in terms of portaudio working with pulseaudio. However due to other changes, the sound that gets played in unintelligable. There is a work-around in place to not use pulseaudio when installing from the live CD when accessibility for blind people is enabled.

[Darxus (darxus)]

Why did you start that with "This should no longer be a problem" when you went on to say "the sound that gets played back is unintelligible"?

[codeslinger (codeslinger)]

this bug is probably fixed now. try 13.04, after a very long wait, the audio system now *finally* works for me.

why was this bug left to sit and rot???? never assigned in 4 years....