On Mon, 2023-11-27 at 08:30 -0500, Jude DaShiell wrote:
Thanks much, this clarifies some things. Screen reader users will have one process running constantly and will need at least another process to permit any other program to generate sound simultaneously. I have pulseaudio on this system and alsa and that probably will be enough for my uses.
The screen readers are probably well integrated when using pulseaudio, so you probably should stay with pulseaudio. However, I made a short test, Firefox and Waterfox can play a YouTube Video at the same time, using the HDMI sound device, without a sound server and without anything I need to set up. I wasn't aware that dmix does work automagically for some audio devices. "Integrated motherboard sound cards (such as Intel HD Audio), usually do not support hardware mixing. On such cards, software mixing is done by an ALSA plugin called dmix. This feature is enabled automatically if hardware mixing is unavailable." - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#Dmix