Main advantages of SBL over Speakup

[Trevor Astrope]

John, yes I do manage servers and I do agree that having speakup in the 
kernel is immensely important if you have a serial port and synth.

Perhaps it is different where you are, but where I live, desktops with 
serial ports are extremely rare. The only ones I managed to find were some 
low end Acers. I also found some business machines with serial ports, but 
they are twice the cost for about half the performance as a consumer 
desktop machine and we don't buy them where I work.

Like Kelly mentioned earlier today, I also do not install speakup in the 
kernels of the servers I manage, but in the machine I use to manage the 
servers.

So, I respectfully disagree with you about the availability of serial 
ports in modern desktop machines and I stand by my statement that speakup 
as a kernel-level speech system will become less relevant over time unless 
it can support external serial ports and usb serial ports. In my opinion, 
this is where speakup development should be focused, as more and more 
people will face this issue as they upgrade their machines. But I am not a 
speakup developer, so I have no influence on the direction it takes. I can 
only offer my opinion, which I have stated several times on this list and 
I can only hope that speakup developers agree with it and take up the 
challenge.

In the meantime, I do have a job to do and I will need to decide whether I 
continue using speakup with software synth, which will make my job more 
difficult or use something else like orca or a mac, which still won't 
solve the problem of having access to early kernel messages, but may give 
me more flexability going forward.

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, John G. Heim wrote:

> Well, perhaps its a minor point but plenty of modern computers have serial 
> ports. I've never seen a server that didn't have a serial port. In fact, 
> except for laptops, I have yet to see a computer that doesn't have a serial 
> port. That includes the 200 or so desktop units we have where I work. Even 
> the machine I built myself has a serial port.
>
> It certainly is a huge over statement to say that having speakup in the 
> kernel  has no advantage. If you manage servers like I do, having speakup in 
> the kernel is just about the most important thing there is for a screen 
> reader. I don't really care that much about what happens after the machine is 
> booted. About the only time I need a run time screen reader is if something 
> is wrong with networking. But mostly, I can admin these machines remotely 
> after they boot.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Trevor Astrope" <astrope at tabbweb.com>
> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 3:09 PM
> Subject: Re: Main advantages of SBL over Speakup
>
>
> Samuel, do you mean there is no kernel convention for accessing serial
> ports or there is no speakup support for accessing serial ports according
> to kernel conventions?
>
> It would be really great if speakup could use ttyS# devices, so speakup
> would work with modern motherboards that do not have built-in serial
> ports. The way I see it is speakup can only use software speech on modern
> computers, so unless it can access external serial ports or usb serial
> ports, there really is no advantage to speakup being in the kernel so far
> as I can tell...
>
> On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>
>> Bill Cox, le Tue 09 Feb 2010 14:23:25 -0500, a écrit :
>>> I hear that it doesn't follow kernel
>>> programming conventions, for example in how it interfaces to the COM
>>> ports.
>> 
>> Yes, because no such thing exists (yet).
>> 
>> Samuel
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>> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>> 
>> 
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