Re: [Emacspeak] SwiftMac prosody mayhem after upgrading macOS Sonoma to Tahoe

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Andrew,

as you may have guessed based on my last post, I'm not one of those
anti-AI folk who think we should avoid it at all costs and that it
heralds the end of the modern world as we know it. I think it is fine
you use AI to help diagnose and possibly fix or extend or help explain
code. It is just a tool and provided you treat it as a tool, recognising
its limitations and understanding where it can be useful, it can be a
really useful tool.

I don't use a mac anymore, so cannot address any of your specific issues
involving the swift mac speech server. However, I would say that the
most recent IOS updates for my phone have been terrible and caused me no
end of issues, especially with respect to voice over and
accessibility. I would go so far as to say it is the most
invasive/problematic upgrade I've had from Apple in the last nearly 20
years of use. I do wonder how much of that is due to too much
dependence/use of AI!

As to switching to Linux, I think that very much depends on personal
preferences and what sort of work you do. I have always been a Linux
user, having first started in 1994. I"m completely lost with Windows and
really only used the Mac because of corporate integration and policy
issues I would run into at work. Mainly it was to do with needing to
interact with so called 'enterprise' solutions which really only worked
with Windows or Mac.

There are some things which are simply more accessible on the Mac
compared to Linux. In particular, having voiceOver as a fall back is
very useful. While Orca is OK, it is fairly tightly tied to the Gnome
desktop, which I really don't like. Web browsing is probably the weakest
area from an accessibility standpoint on Linux. While the things
Emacspeak does in this area are pretty amazing, the lack of close
Javascript integration is a problem. The google chromvox project was
good for a time, but it is now really just a legacy system with little
development for Linux as it focuses mainly on ChromeOS. There are some
other plugins which will read out web pages, but they are not really
good accessibility tools, especially if you are totally blind. While the
combination of Orca and Firfox is not too bad, it can be very
frustrating.

A bit of an issue in the Linux world is the transition from X11 to
Wayland. There has been quite a lot of reports that people have had
significant accessibility issues depending on the Wayland compositor
being used. I suspect provided you stick with Gnome or perhaps KDE you
will be OK, but if you prefer something more light weight, such as
hyprland or Niri (what I use), you are likely to face some issues.

HTH

"aleland.tech.list" (via emacspeak Mailing List) <emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Hello Emacspeakers,
>
> I recently upgraded from macOS Sonoma to Tahoe 26.2, and immediately noticed an unwelcome
> change in the way that SwiftMac 4.3.6 (Emacspeak 60.0; emacs 30.2; using emacs-plus@30 via
> homebrew) handled longer sentences. All the voices I tried (Samantha, Tom, David; both
> enhanced and compressed) would suddenly pause at seemingly random places in a sentence,
> where there was no punctuation. This happened across emacs, in nov.el, org-mode, notmuch,
> anywhere I read text with longer sentences.
>
> I isolated it by testing the same text three ways: in Emacs with my full config, in Emacs
> with emacs -Q loading only Emacspeak, and in TextEdit read by VoiceOver using the same
> voice. VoiceOver read smoothly; both Emacs configurations had the pauses. So it wasn't my
> config, and it wasn't the macOS voice engine.
>
> Then, using a method that I'm hesitant to admit may have included a look at the swiftmac
> source with the help of an AI coding tool (is this a faux pas to admit, let alone deploy?
> The etiquette around AI seems to be fraught at best in FLOSS-land), I discovered the
> chunkText function in main.swift, which as far as I can tell, splits all text into 15-word
> chunks, each sent as a separate AVSpeechUtterance. There's an inherent gap, my friendly
> tool informed me, between utterances, and Tahoe appears to have increased that gap enough
> to become audible, whereas it worked differently under Sonoma? VoiceOver may not chunk
> this way, which is why it's unaffected?
>
> However, with the help of my confident, controversial, possibly problematic AI tool, I
> changed maxWords from 15 to 200 in chunkText() and rebuilt SwiftMac. This fixed the pauses
> for me! Wondering if anyone else had this prosody problem and if you're mad at me for
> using AI to troubleshoot and if this information is at all helpful.
>
> As an aside, I had to abandon the Alex voice altogether, because after upgrading, both
> VoiceOver and SwiftMac have Alex pausing way too long after full stops so that problem
> must be a change in the TTS itself.
>
> Off-topic epilogue: This experience of having my workflow disrupted so intensively (I read
> a ton of text in emacspeak for work and these random pauses really messed with my speed
> and comprehension) by a mere system upgrade has me considering trying out Linux as a daily
> driver, where e.g. Debian/Emacspeak/espeak-ng would seem to be a more stable workflow less
> prone to disruption by Cupertino caprice. Do you agree with this assessment?
>
> Thanks as ever,
> Andrew
>
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