heretical thoughts was Re: Speakup dropped from Ubuntu

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 01:24:45PM -0500, C.M. Brannon wrote:
> The vendors of USB synths won't release their
> product information, so these are unsupported.  Thus, I'm not buying
> one.  Who wants to do business with people like that anyhow? 

I'm in full agreement with you there. I will personally not buy a usb
synth, until I know that the manufacturer has released the specs for
it without requiring an NDA to be signed.

> So it
> looks like software speech is the way of the future, at least for me.
> Next, software speech is more convenient, especially when using a
> laptop.  You have to carry one less peripheral with you.
> 
> The question to ask is this.  Given the decline of hardware synthesis,
> is it really necessary to have speech support within the kernel
> itself?  Software synthesizers run in user mode, so the benefits of a
> speech-enabled kernel -- notably a talking boot process -- are lost.
> 

I agree there with you also. Granted, once you have an installed
distro, hardware speech isn't that vital. However, installation is
still a big issue in that department. Yes, gentoo, fedora, can be
installed over ssh. Grml, ubuntu can be installed with software
speech. However, what if someone wants to install and use a distro
like debian or slackware, that support neither option as far as I
know? Yes, I suppose that one could use the grml livecd to install
debian via debootstrap, however that procedure isn't for everyone,
especially for a newby. So, the fact remains that until it is possible
to install most distros either over the network or via software
speech, hardware speech is still necessary.

As for kernel-based screen readers not being usable during boot with
software speech, the same is true for user space-based screen readers,
such as jupiter for example, that would be using either hardware or
software speech. So, arguably, kernel-based screen readers still very
much have their own advantages, assuming one has access to a hardware
synth of course, though I admit that advantage will become less, and
less important as everyone moves to software speech eventually.

Greg

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