Main advantages of SBL over Speakup

[Bill Cox]

I agree.  I do still wish for application specific keybindings in
speakup, and maybe even some scripting capability, but I think speakup
should remain the default console reader in Vinux for the forseable
future.  There's some chance we can get Ubuntu to start building
speakup, which would greatly simplify life.

One other thing I've heard mentioned about speakup.  I haven't looked
at the source code yet, but I hear that it doesn't follow kernel
programming conventions, for example in how it interfaces to the COM
ports.  Is this true, and if so, are there things we can do to get
speakup cleaned up enough to get included in the mainline kernel?

Bill

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:07 PM, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com> wrote:
> I think you have had a response which reflects my views fairly well. Speakup
> is aimed at different people to SBL. The only thing I might add is that
> packaging speakup doesn't really seem any more difficult than the packaging
> of those optional drivers, eg. the nvidia GLX stuff, a sighted person needs
> a driver for the video card so they can have useful output, I need a way of
> making my apollo synth to give useful output (speakup).
>
> One big difference is that SBL has Braille support although I have to be
> honest and say that when I tried SBL for that feature I wasn't impressed,
> brltty seems to be much more reliable. I didn't really try SBL for speech
> output as speakup really meets my needs for text console access (in the
> speech department, brltty for the Braille).
>
> There does seem to be a dedicated set of users of SBL, so your effort of
> getting SBL on ubuntu is probably of value. Its good to have the choice, I
> choose not to use it because I find features of greater value in other
> software. Let's not duplicate work by having separately developed clones.
>
> Michael Whapples
> On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Bill Cox wrote:
>>
>> I'm trying to port SBL (Suse Blind Linux) to Ubuntu.  It is the
>> default console screen reader in Knoppix Adrian.  Some users report
>> they prefer SBL, and two main reasons are given:
>>
>> - SBL has application specific keybindings, all of which are
>> user-configurable.  This makes it easy to be more Orca compatible.
>> - SBL relies only on the uinput and console devices, and doesn't need
>> any special modules to be compiled for the current kernel.  This makes
>> it possible to ship as a simple Debian package.
>>
>> Is there any chance the speakup guys might want to work on either of
>> these two features?  I think it would greatly increase the appeal of
>> speakup to the main distro developers.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Bill
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>