kernel pre-emption and software speech

[John Heim]

I think that those of us who depend on speakup but don't have the expertise 
to help with the code could contribute in terms of putting pressure (for 
lack of a better term) on the kernel developers to give you the assistance 
you need.

I mean, we could write to the powers that be, whoever they are (Alan and/or 
Linus?) and ask them to make this a high priority item.

Maybe the kernel developers don't understand how important speakup is. 
People's livelihoods (like mine) depend on it. I literally could not do my 
job w/o speakup.


With you being willing to do the work, it would be really unforgivable if 
the holdup was on their end.  I don't thing anybody would be unwilling to 
help if they were made aware of the problem. That would be inhuman.

Even here at the math department at the University of Wisconsin, not 
everybody patches the kernel when they make a custom kernel for particular 
machine. And this is a fairly small shop. Say you work in a large shop, the 
only machines that are going to have speakup built in are those you set up 
yourself. And that means that for a blind person, the vast majority of 
machines at a facility would be unusable.

And then there's the live CDs. We either have to have special versions of 
those or we have to count on the developers to patch the code. You've got to 
give the people at grml a hand for their work. But it would be so much nicer 
if it just worked by default.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kirk Reiser" <kirk at braille.uwo.ca>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 12:28 PM
Subject: Re: kernel pre-emption and software speech


> Quite a few of the changes suggested in Adrian Bunk's suggestion list
> were implemented.  Others I didn't understand the criticisms and when
> I asked did not get definitive answers.  Some of the suggestions I
> didn't understand, I could not figure out how else to implement.  I
> have offered to rewrite sections of the code with help from many
> people that have offered and have never been able to actually get any
> help after the offering.  I have basically given up on the process
> because of lack of expertise on my part and lack of assistance on the
> part of others.  I originally worked closely with Alan Cox to get it
> in and it was mostly there and then Alan and Linus had their falling
> out and so that ended up slipping down the tubes.
>
> I would like speakup to be in the actual kernel code because that
> would make my job easier maintaining it when someone else changes the
> kernel code they would have to be partially aware of the speakup code
> needing to be modified also.  As it is speakup works well for the most
> part and is relatively easy to patch for novices.  I am not going to
> try to get in the kernel code any more unless someone is really
> willing to help me with the modifications and answer my silly
> questions when I have them, which is often.
>
> I have been moving speakup to git or I should say Daniel Drake has
> moved speakup to git but it is not ready for prime-time yet.  I either
> have to rewrite the checkout/checkin scripts or move to another system
> such as quilt.  My first looks at quilt have not been overwhelmingly
> encouraging because of what looks to be lack of documentation or
> tutorials or something.  I can't find anything useful reading wise on
> the quilt web page.  Maybe I have the wrong page who knows but Daniel
> gave it to me so I suspect it is just sparse.
>
>  Kirk
>
> -- 
>
> Kirk Reiser The Computer Braille Facility
> e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca University of Western Ontario
> phone: (519) 661-3061
>
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