Main advantages of SBL over Speakup

[John G. Heim]

I just think you are over stating your case. I'm sure the speakup developers 
would love to support USB.   But your original  comment was that speakup 
doesn't support modern  motherboards -- which is just totally untrue.  You 
also said that having speakup in the kernel has "no advantage". Also untrue. 
I don't have a problem with your offereing the suggestion that speakup be 
modified to support USB hardware synths. I just think you shouldn't 
exaggerate the problems. After all, look at the subject line of this thread, 
"Main advantages of SBL over Speakup."  If we're going to compare sbl and 
speakup, lets be fair about it.

You made it sound like speakup is already obsolete. And that's just not 
true. Really, it seems to me to be a fairly small niche you are in. We both 
agree that most servers have serial ports, right? So your problem is that 
you have a desktop with no serial port but you have to have speech right 
away during boot? Why can't you just use software speech on your desktop? In 
fact, I'm unclear as to why it is so important to you that the workstations 
you support have hardware synth speech. As I said, all of the PCs in my 
department have serial ports (literally 100s of machines) but when I have to 
do support, I just use software speech. I'm not going to drag my hardware 
speech synth around with me unless I have to. Its so much easier just to 
grap a USB headset and fire up software speech.

Actually, some years ago, I posted a message to this list about how you 
could modify your udev rules to recognize when your USB headset is plugged 
into a machine and have it start software speech.  Each USB device has a 
unique serial number and you can write a udev rule to run a script to start 
speech when a device with a specific serial number is plugged in. So its 
possible to sit down at a PC at the login prompt, plug in your USB headset, 
and login with speech.

---- Original Message ----- 
From: "Trevor Astrope" <astrope at tabbweb.com>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 1:09 PM
Subject: Re: Main advantages of SBL over Speakup


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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Speakup mailing list
>> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>>
>>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Speakup mailing list
>> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>
>


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>