Hello, I recently installed Stretch on two test laptops (both amd) and had no speech from Orca after install, however, braille does work fine with Orca and in the console and Speakup talks fine as well. I used the non-free rc1 image because the wireless cards in both machines require firmware. One thing worth noting is that speakup stopped talking at different points of both installations and I had to finish the installs using only braille. During the first install, speakup crashed at the detecting networking hardware step and in the second install, it crashed when starting the partitioner. On both machines. With Debian stable, speech from Orca works correctly so I guess this is a regression from the previous release of Debian. Speakup also does not crash when installing Debian stable on these machines. In the Stretch install, the HDMI sound device was selected as the default device in the Mate Control Panel on both laptops. After changing this to my internal sound card using braille, I was able to record and play sound as well as use other applications like espeak from the Mate Terminal and I heard sound through my speakers, however, I could not get orca to talk. I tried some troubleshooting steps without success to fix this issue. 1. I first tried using spd-say to play speech using speech dispatcher directly and that did not work. 2. I tried restarting the Pulseaudio process as well as the computer. Another thing that I tried was deleting the ~/.config/pulse folder. 3. I tried running spd-conf and I got an error when running this so as a workaround, I copied /etc/speech-dispatcher to ~/.config/speech-dispatcher. After this, I changed the default audio device from pulse to libao in speechd.conf and restarted the speech dispatcher process and the computer and still could not get sound to work.
I am at a loss now of other things to try and was wondering if anyone else has had these issues. I have a laptop that is Intel that is available for testing so will try that later today. The two laptops that I tried were both HP pavilions. One had an AMD processor from the 15h series, the other had a 16h series processor. The laptop I will use for testing this afternoon has a core 2 duo processor. Any advice or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.
