Feisty SpeakUp

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Hi John,

Thanks for your feedback. CLI is 'Command Line Interface', sorry.

We are working on making it easier to customise the Live CD. Here bare 
some instructions for the moment: 
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization

However, I would like to see if we could cover your points 1 and 2 with 
the standard Ubuntu Live CD so everyone can benefit. All the required 
modules are on it already.

This would not make the CD start automatically in that mode but would 
make it very easy to start it. All Ubuntu Live CDs have a boot menu with 
an accessibility option. You press F5 after the CD has booted (takes 
about 5-10 seconds, the CD spins up and down again -- we should also add 
a beep at this stage) and then you press a number -- 3 for screen reader.

For Feisty we are planning to add better braille support (see: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs/BrailleSupport) and I could 
imagine adding support for hardware synths through the same infrastructure.

Basically you would insert the CD, wait for a beep, press F5, 6, Enter 
to boot, wait for another beep, h for HW synth,  0 for ttyS0 and that 
should be it. That's not fully automatic but it should be quite easy to 
get right and would work on bog standard CDs.

We could also make speakup work in character mode as you suggest. If you 
press Ctrl-Alt-F2 on a live CD AND it was booted with F5+3 (or 6) then 
it would speak directly. This would also be useful for those who mostly 
use gnome+orca.

Henrik

John Heim wrote:
> I'm not sure what CLI is. Console log in?
>
> I do systems support and programming for the Math Department at the U of 
> Wisconsin. And I use speakup every day for just about everything you can do 
> on a computer -- mail, web browsing, homework assignments. I even listen to 
> music on my laptop.  I have a hardware synth that connects to the serial 
> port so if i need to log into the console of a server, I can do that. Also, 
> I use a live CD pretty regularly to do installs and rescues.  I always use 
> the machine in character mode, never the GUI. I haven't even tried orca or 
> gnopernicus because everything I do can be done in character mode.
>
> A couple of things I would like:
> 1. To be able to easily recreate the iso image with customized boot 
> parameters. This would allow me to make a live CD that "knows" that i have a 
> hardware synth connected to ttyS0. No need to type in cheat codes at the 
> boot prompt.
>
> This is more than mere convenience. When a machine is down and the user (or 
> my boss) is watching me boot it, it would be nice to not have to worry about 
> missing the boot prompt or typing the cheat codes wrong
>
> 2. I'd like the live CD to start software speech automatically if no 
> hardware synth has been specified at boot time. I think you could do this by 
> checking the contents of /proc/speakup/synth_name and if it's 'none', then 
> load software speech.  What I'm imagining  is that if a user goes into 
> character mode, the machine starts talking. Speakup doesn't work in the GUI 
> so if you press Ctrl+Alt+F2, you get a character console. Then it talks. 
> That's the way my machines already work and I didn't have to do anything 
> special.
>
>