Speakup in user space, why or why not?

[Sina Bahram]

You summed things up greatly.

Thanks for your input.

Take care,
Sina 

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of Lorenzo Taylor
Sent: Sunday, October 02, 2005 11:10 PM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: Speakup in user space, why or why not?

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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
- --
Living your life is a task so difficult, it has never been attempted before.
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