Using and Controlling RevSpeak

[David Glasgow]

I am working with RevSpeak for the first time.

I am using it to read back to the user the sate of 51 radio buttons,  
so they can be easily checked against the paper copy from which the  
data was originally entered.  It works fine, assuming speech is  
available, and the user doesn't want to pause or abort the readout.

I am having trouble with checking preflight that speech is  
available.  The obvious approach would be to revspeak "Starting Read  
back" and check for an error.  However, the docs are a little vague  
about the error which would be expected - and which I assume will be  
OS specific.  So, first question is what kind of thing should I check  
for, before either reading out button states or gently advising the  
user that they don't have speech available?

The second point is play - pause - stop controllability. The radio  
button states are each read individually within a loop, with a brief  
wait after a revisspeaking check before reading them.  I thought I  
could implement a read data while 'play' button hilited and stop when  
unhilited (like you might do with audio or video).  However, this  
doesn't seem as easy to script as I expected.  I inserted a 'play'  
button state check within the loop and a contingent exit command, but  
the whole thing is very unresponsive, with the button state sometimes  
missing clicks, and sometimes responding after a delay.  In other  
words, a recipe for furious user clicking stacking up state changes  
until crash (which is what I eventually got).

Has anyone any suggestions?

Best

David Glasgow