Speakup with Fedora or Redhat

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
Firstly I seem to have a distant memory of reading something saying 
about adjusting the font size in a text console, however it is very 
distant and I don't have any more information on that. You may want to 
look into it.

Anyway coming to the main point, is starting speech output just before 
the log in prompt enough? I would say yes it is, I think its the best 
you will manage with software speech output anyway. On a properly 
configured system booting to the log in prompt really should not fail 
and if your trying to make it the best system for VI users, part of the 
user experience should be reliability. Hardware speech output is a 
different matter, it can be made to start earlier, if built as modules 
then I think an initrd can be used to start speakup earlier than normal 
module loading if you really desire this.

Getting gnome to start reliably I feel is a bit harder, there's so many 
components which may go wrong which would prevent accessibility in gnome 
starting (from problems with X starting to problems with at-spi, to 
possible problems with orca). While it can be made fairly reliable I 
still ideally would want a text console backup like speakup or brltty.

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, Bill Cox wrote:
> I only rarely use speakup, as I can still read large fonts, so I'm
> using Gnome most of the time.  However, speakup comes up talking by
> default in all the Vinux distributions with espeakup.  The current
> version, Vinux 2.0, is based on Debian, and has excellent speech
> performance.  No need to recompile the kernel.  The main drawback is
> it doesn't read boot messages, so if it doesn't start talking on the
> console login prompt, you're in real trouble.
>
> I'm building speakup support into an upcoming release of Vinux/Ubuntu
> Lucid.  I use it with the voxin speech synthesizer, which not only
> sounds like Eloquence, it is Eloquence!  Almost, anyway.  It's
> actually a slightly outdated version of Eloquence.  Still, I love it.
> There's a small charge - $5 or $6 US, but the guys selling it at
> voxin.oralux.org are doing this at-cost, with no profit.
>
> I would like the upcoming release of Vinux/Ubuntu Lucid to be the best
> distro ever for the blind/VI, which means solid speakup support is a
> must.  I've got it working very well with speechd-up,
> speechd-dispatcher, voxin, and pulseaudio, but it doesn't start
> talking until the login prompt.  Is this OK, or do I need to compile
> speakup into the kernel?
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
>
>