Speakup in user space, why or why not?

[Lorenzo Taylor]

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Comparing speakup to yasr or emacspeak is like comparing a sports car to a
bicycle.  Speakup by far gives much better access to the text console than
emacspeak and yasr combined.  Even brltty, if you have access to a braille
display gives better access to the console than emacspeak or yasr.

Take brltty as an example.  As soon as it loads into memory, the user has access
to every character on the screen, including the login prompt, and none of it is
in the kernel.  It can run on several different Unix-like operating systems with
no trouble.  Any screen reader should give the same console access, which is
what makes Speakup the best thing going right now.  The problem is cross-OS
compatibility.  Since Speakup is entirely kernel-based, there is no way to port
it to other operating systems or to allow new linux users who are afraid of
compiling a kernel for the first time or who don't know how or want to deviate
from the stock kernel of their distro to use it.

Emacspeak, on the other hand, requires that the user already be logged in in
order to use it, and yasr is the same in that regard.  Emacspeak requires emacs
in order to function and yasr gets its console data by opening a pseudoterminal
and running a shell in it, which can't be done until the user is already logged
in.  Plus, using yasr is like using speakup with the cursoring turned off.  It
can really be a pain to navigate around the console sometimes.

Take it from an avid speakup user, both with hardware speech on one computer and
software speech on the other, I wouldn't want to use anything else for console
speech.  I just think it would be appropriate to have a similar screen reader
with all the functionality of Speakup without having to recompile my kernel to
get it.  And it would also be nice to be able to run the same screen reader on
other operating systems such as FreeBSD without having to use 2 computers.

Hope this explains things more clearly,
Lorenzo
- -- 
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