FreeBSD and speech again

[Tony Baechler]

I'm not a programmer and I have no idea if this would help us at all, but with the new console driver described below, would it be possible to develop something similar to Speakup on the FreeBSD kernel?

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce another funded project!

Ed Schouten has been awarded a grant to write a new console driver for
the FreeBSD project.  We are excited to support Ed in providing a more
efficient and user friendly console driver.

This project will allow Ed to add an additional abstraction layer to the
kernel. This new layer, the terminal layer will be a layer that sits
between the TTY layer, the kernel console (cngetc, cnputc) and the
actual console driver. Right now we have a terminal emulator (libteken)
that is part of Syscons. This terminal emulator will be moved into this
terminal layer.

The advantage of having such a layer, is that the console driver itself
does not have to care about any TTY semantics, streams of bytes,
processing escape sequences, etc. It will just receive a set of
character drawing, filling and copying actions. This should also make it
easier to implement Unicode.

"During this project I'm going to continue the work I did with the TTY
layer, by developing a new console driver for the FreeBSD kernel," said
Ed Schouten, FreeBSD Developer. "By moving towards a graphics mode
console driver, it will be much easier to make the boot process look
nice on desktop systems (i.e. PC-BSD). It will also make it possible to
support the industry-standard Unicode character sets by default."

This project will be completed by the end of December.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation