Speakup Web Site

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

One thing that I think is in desperate need of being addressed is making 
other developers aware that Speakup exists, greatly increases 
accessibility, and can easily be installed into a production kernel.  I 
have two specific reasons for saying this.  First, there are very few 
distros which include Speakup as part of their official kernel and 
installer images.  Unless I'm mistaken, Debian doesn't include it 
officially now and the unofficial install image isn't current.  I would 
strongly recommend against anyone using the unofficial Etch kernel with 
Speakup because it hasn't been updated since the release of Etch and has 
known security flaws that aren't fixed.  Most of the smaller and lesser 
known distros don't include Speakup either even though there is no good 
reason not to include it.  I have thought about using various 
specialized distros designed to replace hardware routers and firewalls 
but I'm not aware of any that include Speakup.  Obviously the point 
would be to keep the distro small but it could still be built into the 
kernel.

The second reason may be of less interest to people here but I think 
it's important just the same.  That is to make commercial projects that 
are based on the Linux kernel also aware of Speakup.  Specifically, I'm 
working with a company that makes backup imaging software for DOS, 
Windows, and Linux.  It is possible but difficult to use the DOS version 
with a screen reader.  I suggested that they could build Speakup into 
the Linux version and it would be accessible out of the box.  They 
seemed interested but I think the project is stalled because the site is 
not current.  I didn't know at the time, but apparently Speakup had 
already switched to git and there was no mention of that in the old CVS 
repository.  Apparently they found the new git repo but I don't know how 
because I wasn't aware of it until Kirk posted the url here.  It makes 
it difficult to push for better accessibility when the site is very old 
and the project looks abandoned.  While I'm here, I would also like to 
suggest putting a link to the most current release (maybe a snapshot 
made nightly from git?) and the most recent stable release right on the 
home page.  Many people, especially the developers described above, 
don't have time to browse through a site just to find a download link.  
Since most people consider it a favor to include any kind of 
accessibility in their particular distro's kernel, they really don't 
understand what Speakup is except that it's supposed to help the blind.  
Maybe a mp3 demo of someone using Speakup for daily tasks would be good.

Dawes, Stephen wrote:
> What do you want to see in a revitalized Web site? 
>