Firefox speech synthesis not working - does not have access to Speech Dispatcher library
I like to use Firefox's Reader Mode to read long articles. Unfortunately, Reader Mode gives this error message: "You can't use speech synthesis because the Speech Dispatcher is missing". I don't have problems with short text, so I've never had to use the built-in Orca screenreader (and having tried, I don't care to). Orca does work, which suggests to me that Speech-Dispatcher is in fact present on Bazzite. Can anyone help me allow Firefox to see it? I've tried using home-manager (I don't care for Fleek) to install manually speechd, but it hasn't seemed to fix anything even after reboots.
Solution:Jump to solution
if that doesn't work, you can run firefox in distrobox to get this working most likely
4 Replies
We use flatpak by default for Firefox, you're likely running into this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1638150
1638150 - Speech dispatcher support is missing from the Flatpak ver...
UNCONFIRMED (lissyx+mozillians) in Core - Widget: Gtk. Last updated 2023-09-16.
Since it's removed from the OCI I don't believe it can be re-layered with rpm-ostree install (but it's worth trying)
Solution
if that doesn't work, you can run firefox in distrobox to get this working most likely
thank you! This sounds promising, will try it out. If it works, I'll mark solved.
can confirm, distrobox seems to solve the problem. Thank you!