How to fully kill text-to-speech?

Intro: one of the most irritating things in Windows is the "assistance" system that offers disabled people extra facilities to use their system. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy it is offered for those that need it, but it would be so nice if it was only ever installed on request, instead of lying dormant waiting to pounce on a regular who accidentally holds down a key too long - it's like waking up a built-in virus. You end up digging deep into the system to find a way to turn it all off, only to discover in a few weeks from then that you haven't. That's the point where you discover you can only make the monster sleep: there is no way to kill it off permanently.

Imagine thus the horror of finding my Mac going unprompted into text-to-speech mode on entering Front Row: it turns out that a program called Little Snitch (a network monitor) happily ignores the DO NOT USE setup in the System configuration. And guess what? OSX too appears to have no means to totally disable, remove, nuke and/or rip out this "service" root & branch. Yes, exactly that bane is portable.

Is there anyone out there who knows how to fully nuke this component so it never, ever comes near my machine again unless I actually WANT it? Naturally I have asked the people behind Little Snitch to stop calling that API in Front Row, but in principle it would be best if the API simply didn't even exist or did not do anything. God knows what else may activate this *cough* feature..

System Preferences > Speech

Is anything enabled? If so… disable them.

Err - no.

Maybe I should add that I've only been working with computers for 30 years, so thank you, but I'm not seeking for the bleeding obvious

Speech has everything unticked that can be unticked, Universal Access has everything off (I've gone through every setting) - yet Little Snitch is still able to activate the whole thing when you enter Front Row. Ergo the System Preferences controls are NOT working (or LS isn't paying any attention to them, but it would be nice if it had no access to it in the first place).

Hence my desire to rip this crap out of the system root & branch or neutralise it in any other way - what isn't there cannot be activated. It used to be rule 1 of building firewalls too..

At the risk of getting my hand bitten as you just did to the previous poster here's a couple of thoughts.

I'm assuming you've disabled everything under Universal Access in System Preferences? I'm not sure i understand the relationship between Little Snitch and this particular OS X function?? If you uncheck Enable Access for assistive devices - does the issue persist?

If none of the above applies take a look at this thread http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/234943-how-disable-text-speech-os-x.html and consider messaging that OP who I know is still an active member of this forum to see if he managed to figure it out. Or, take a look at the link I posted there and post back once you've figured it out.

Interesting..

Mea Culpa - I should have mentioned that I'm not *quite* a beginner (having said that, I didn't come across your link as viable because it referred to OSX 10.5.x).

After following your link I think I may have an idea now, there is someone I know who likes digging. Let's see what he comes up with - I'll post it if there is a solution...

BTW, I noticed this site is absolutely laced with trackers (see my profile image - that's a screen dump). Interesting..

nuclear.glow said:

BTW, I noticed this site is absolutely laced with trackers (see my profile image - that's a screen dump). Interesting..

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Can anyone see this profile image?

nuclear.glow said:

Maybe I should add that I've only been working with computers for 30 years, so thank you, but I'm not seeking for the bleeding obvious

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30 whole years? WOW! I've only been working with (and building) computers for 22ish years. But I have been dealing with ... for 44+ years now. I have other ideas for your problem (the computer one, not your personality), but since they are rather obvious to me, I'll spare insulting you with the suggestions.

To all others, please don't indulge this troll any further.

I have other ideas for your problem, but since they are rather obvious to me, I'll spare insulting you with the suggestions.

I can play some tapes with fake US talkshow applause if you need cuddling. I translate it as "I have no suggestion, only the illusion thereof". Having said that, my original reply was not right and I ought to be man enough apologise for that, so hereby. I cannot go into the circumstances, but I should have known better than to post after a long day.

To all others, please don't indulge this troll any further.

Yes, mein Fuehrer. So glad you take it upon yourself to command the unruly hordes. Anyway, I'll skip this before you trigger any other bad traits in me (I'm only human).

There is a subsystem in OSX which one specific App triggers even though disables in the System preferences. This suggests the subsystem remains active, relying on the applications to follow system preferences but not enforcing it. Some people have posted working solutions for OSX 10.5.8, but they do not appear to work for OSX 10.6.7 (which also implies that solving it may only offer temporary relief as 10.7 is around the corner).

There are three routes to address it:

- get the application to stop calling the subsystem. Reported to the authors, but I don't expect much of it as I found reports of this bug as far back as 2009 which suggests it may be an unwanted interaction which is complex to fix.

- enforce the preferences as set in the System Preferences. This gets interesting as there are two locations handling the subsystem, but neither has a kill switch for the functionality (an approach which is strangely MS Windows compatible). There is thus no means to enforce it from a standard UI perspective, but one may exist in command line controls as shown in 10.5.8.

- rip out the entire subsystem, leaving in place dummy APIs so apps that do call upon the functionality don't hang or otherwise need changing. In hindsight not possible despite being the best option (you cannot activate what isn't there) as it's IMHO not viable to do this without the potential for future problems.

Alternatively, I could avoid using Front Row, of course. I don't use it much, but I wanted to see what it could do as I was considering an Apple TV, which is when I stumbled upon this problem.

You're right, I presume the image dimensions exceed the parameters for the image.
In the spirit of closing that conversation properly, I suggest you download Ghostery and have a look yourself. It's quite a list. Ghostery is at http://www.ghostery.com.

nuclear.glow said:

Maybe I should add that I've only been working with computers for 30 years,

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Maybe you should have stopped there..

Speech has everything unticked that can be unticked, Universal Access has everything off (I've gone through every setting) -

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But that information would have been helpful in your original post. It's pretty typical of novice forum users to say "this is the problem" but leave out "this is what I've tried". If you tell us what hasn't satisfied you, we have a better shot at getting deeper into it rather than suggesting things you've already done. To paraphrase, seems "bleeding obvious" to me.

toMACsh said:

But that information would have been helpful in your original post..

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I stand corrected - that I should have done. It's one of the side effects os not having been near forum discussions for about 15 years or so - I used to do this a lot in BBS and Usenet contexts before the spammers moved in, but it's been a while. Apart from that I have been beseeched by idiots who don't follow the most basic first steps and thus end up in life threatening situations (don't ask, it's what I do for a living) which has apparently affected myself a bit too much. I forgot that nowadays you have to tell upfront that you're beyond reading the help files.

I'll first say sorry to the original poster. He was only trying to help, and I ought to be man enough to acknowledge a mistake. Thanks for the reply - I'm awake now

Happy Easter Gents!

I wish I knew the answer - but obviously I do not. The closest I was able to get was the 'fix' that worked for 10.5.8 - as you've already seen. I was hopeful even then that one of our Mac OS X experts could weigh in and take it further. I've been using Mac OS X for all of about 3 months now. In the interest of providing further potential leads to follow - one might assume that this capability is built upon the mechanisms which support the 'say' command in Mac OS X - which uses the Mac OS X Speech Synthesis engine and I'm assuming the troublesome apps in question invoke the Synthesis APIs described here Speech Synthesis Programming Guide. I guess you could always experiment with eliminating the speech synthesizers located here /System/Library/Speech/Synthesizers - but I don't know if that would just cause a recurring error or if there's any way to disable that API completely. Maybe one of our resident Mac OS experts can carry this further.

Yes - I don't think many people use Front Row - and I believe I read that Front Row will disappear with Lion .

nuclear.glow said:

Thanks for the reply - I'm awake now

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You're welcome, sir(?).

Update: solved (-ish)

After looking at all the options, the path of the least resistance appeared to be replacing the product that caused the problem (accepting the residual risk that it may happen again with another application, à la Windows).

I have replaced Obdev's Little Snitch with Metakine's Hands Off! which gives even more comprehensive insight in what applications are doing out of sight (and is thus correspondingly more initial work to tune).

FrontRow now behaves as it should.