Main advantages of SBL over Speakup

[John G. Heim]

Does sbl start talking as early in the boot process as speakup? You can get 
speakup to speak very early in the boot process by compiling it into the 
kernel. It seems to me that if sbl does not have kernel mods, it can't do 
that. But maybe I'm just misunderstanding what people have said about sbl.

I think the speakup developers decided long ago that beginning speech as 
early as possible was job one. And I agree with that. I don't know why 
anyone would  write a character mode screen reader for linux at this point 
unless they think they can get it into the kernel code.  That would have 
made sense. Maybe somebody at suse said, "Hmm, it doesn't look like speakup 
is ever going to be included in the kernel. Lets write something that will." 
Not that I'd agree or approve but that would at least make sense.

IMO, if suse has extra developers that they want working on accessibility, 
they should have helped with either speakup or orca.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Whapples" <mwhapples at aim.com>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 12:07 PM
Subject: Re: Main advantages of SBL over Speakup


>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
>>
>>
>
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