speechd-up

[Hynek Hanke]

On 29.7.2010 23:32, William Hubbs wrote:
> Does Brailcom have any plans to restart maintenance of speechd-up?  If
> not, I am willing to volunteer to maintain it.

First of all, thanks for the proposal!

We don't want to continue the current way of Speakup and
speechd-up because it is harder and harder to maintain
in the current state. We are however open for further
development of both technologies that will take it to a state
where it gets up to the current standards and get us a chance
to maintain interoperability.

The two major reasons why the current state is unsufficient
are as follows:

1) Although we likely need some improvements
in the kernel for text console accessibility, it
is inapropriate to have the whole screen reader
in the kernel. This is also a reason why it was
never accepted to the official kernels and why
most distributions do not even offer Speakup
kernel packages and some of those who did in the
past have dropped it.

Movement of the actual screen reader
application into user space would finally allow
to integrate it with software speech synthesis
much better, do proper internationalization,
operate USB screen readers and such.

I'm sure clean improvements would
be accepted into the official kernels, which
would be a huge improvement for the users.

We however need the Speakup developers
to agree on this, which was not the case
before. The situation might however be different
now.

2) speechd-up runs as a system service which
is wrong for this type of application. speechd-up
needs to move into user session. This will involve
integration with ConsoleKit and extending ConsoleKit
with the "idle" user session, as was already discussed
for Speech Dispatcher.

Migration into user session will make sure it is
connectable onto Speech Dispatcher, the audio stack,
can operate DBUS based technologies and plays well
with multiple users using the same machine. It will
also solve part of the security concerns.

It is now necessary to investigate what needs to
be done, setup a roadmap and implement the
necessary changes. If there is power and will
to do that, we will be happy to host such a project
on Free(b)Soft.

Best regards,
Hynek Hanke