userspace console screenreaders was Re: speechd-up

[Trevor Saunders]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:50:16PM -0500, Chris Brannon wrote:
> >  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.

I doubt it, I believe glib is pretty big and the speech dispatcher
daemon I just looked at was ~400 kb, so I suspect its larger than you
really want in an initrd.

AFAIK WIlliam said minimal enviroments where the original use case for
espeakup, I suspect you could get it into an initrd.

> > 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...

yeah, that's one option, dlopening libspeechd, or a configure option
like --enable-speech would be some other options.

> Also, not all systems use the same login program.
> There are variants.

true, but I doubt they are so different that it would be difficult to
port the patch between them.

> But this idea would work beautifully on a distro that was customized for
> the blind.

yeah, it would work well there, but I'd rather have something that
worked everywhere.  I'd think you want a middle ground if you
implemented this something like normally silent, but if some keystroke
is sent then we enable accessible login.  I supose the other answer is
that our daemon that reads early boot messages handles this.

Trev

> > 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
> 
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