Speakup in user space, why or why not?

[Jim Grimsby]

Hi,  so basically the kernel version could be used to get the operating
system installed and to read your boot messages on Linux.  The user
space version could be used to work with other operating systems and
allow you to update your kernel with out losing speakup.  Sounds like
the best of both worlds to this boy.  

-----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 8:10 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
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