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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.

Nikli
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    you very lickely have to open a bug report with orca's devs :( – tatsu Jul 05 '19 at 14:21
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    This 2020 tutorial suggests that only the espeak-ng voices seem to work, as yet: https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2020/07/02/an-orca-screen-reader-tutorial/ Which is too bad, as there're are much better options with Festival - https://askubuntu.com/a/908889/930804.

    Definitely not great, but so far the best espeak-ng voice I've found is Storm.

    We definitely need to up our game on this in Linux land. If I needed a screen reader, I definitely wouldn't want to have to use a Linux machine. As it is, I do all my testing for accessibility on a Mac.

     – Andrew Jan 08 '21 at 17:18
  • Thanks for the links, Andy. I've currently got my friend fairly productive using WSL2 in conjunction with JAWs, but you're right about a better solution being sorely needed. Between Windows and JAWs pricing, it's really an exorbitant amount of money for a disadvantaged community to have to fork out to have basic access to computing. – Nikli Jun 22 '21 at 01:11
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    espeak-ng-mbrola with the us-mbrola-1 voice seems to be an improvement over Storm. – Vadim Peretokin Jun 20 '22 at 12:09

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