pulseaudio and speech: performance issues

[Bill Cox]

I agree it's not as responsive as Windows with JAWs, for instance.  I
think I can hear a slight delay relative to the system I had setup
with Ubuntu 9.10 using only alsa, and not pulseaudio, but I'm not
sure.  My vision is still reasonably good, and I don't think I'm able
to hear the differences blind people hear.  Also, my laptop is a
quad-core Intel I7 architecture, which blows doors.  Delays on other
machines might be quite a bit worse.

There is more tuning to be done.  I simply found that with tlength set
to 100, rather than a default of over 4000, that keys were spoken
immediatly rather than buffered until I hit the next key.  I think
there are settings that effect latency, and I haven't tried them.

That said, I suspect we're not going to get to the performance you're
use to in Windows.  I don't know all the details of what's in the way,
but what I hear on Windows is quite impressive, and not quite matched
yet in Linux, and I do think PulseAudio adds a barely perceptable (to
me) delay.  However, I find that I don't notice it unless I
concentrate on it, and I feel the responsiveness is quite good while
using it.  Other issues tend to bother me more, though they are
manageable, and far better than even six months ago.  I have to
restart Orca now and then, and about once a day, my Firefox crashes.
I have the default Orca installed on my Karmic machine, though, and
the latest for Lucid very likely continues progress towards stability.

Bill