userspace console screenreaders was Re: speechd-up

[Chris Brannon]

>  I don't use speakup much, but to be perfectly honest I think if we
> want information from early boot a kernel module is probably the right
> answer.  I believe brltty does fairly well at this though so maybe
> there is another reasonable answer

Yes there is.  A daemon could be run from initrd.  I don't know if it
would be feasible to run Speech Dispatcher from initrd, though.

> As I've said before if you are willing to do mad hacks you can run
> However I'd like to propose a different
> solution if we want to use yasr as the terminal screen reader to go
> forward with.   That is to patch login to be able to speak the prompt

That sounds nice.  Would the login maintainer go for it?
I doubt that he or she would want login to depend on Speech Dispatcher.
I suppose that the patched login program could call the spd-say program, so
that it is a soft dependency, rather than a hard dependency...
Also, not all systems use the same login program.
There are variants.
But this idea would work beautifully on a distro that was customized for
the blind.

> I think yasr as a terminal screen does have some benefits too,
> particularly the fact that you can run it in shells with an x session

Yes, it does, and it's highly portable.  yasr is a very fine screenreader.

-- Chris