A couple of uses for vmware: a way to get speakup in your Mac terminal instead of voiceover

[Cheryl Ann Homiak]

Hi all.

Since brltty is working well for me on this vmware fusion installation (it 
didn't a couple of years ago) I realized that I could ssh into my Mac with 
braille in the terminal which could eliminate the need to use the Mac 
terminal with brltty or voiceover; in fact, I don't actually even have to 
open terminal on the Mac. This led me to start thinking about a 
voiceoveron podbean podcast recently lamenting the limited usability of 
the Mac terminal with voiceover as compared to speakup on linux. Suddenly 
I realized the solution to that problem really is relatively simple. Of 
course you can ssh into a Mac using speakup for speech but what if you 
don't have both a linux machine and a Mac or what if you don't want to 
have to be running both machines all the time? You can set up a virtual 
machine on the mac (I used Arch), ssh into the mac, and do anything in the 
Mac terminal that you want to do with full use of speakup. I just did this 
as a trial to update my subversion install of brltty on my Mac. I'm using 
a full usb Apple keyboard that has a numeric keypad. Voiceover of course 
didn't talk during the svn procedure at all, at least not related to that 
activity. I was able to stop speech with the option key and use the 
numeric keypad to check the output. In short, it worked just as if I had 
somehow managed to install speakup on my mac for use in Terminal! Of 
course, if you have a vmware installation, you may not use Terminal on the 
Mac as much anyway but there still may be programs you want to compile or 
tasks you want to run on the Mac using terminal, plus you can have a 
vmware installation of linux plus the use of Macports and/or Fink along 
with the tools already present in the Mac's terminal by default and manage 
all of these with speakup and/or brltty. I should mention that if you are 
using a laptop keyboard or other keyboard without a numeric keypad, this 
may present challenges but it works perfectly with a full keyboard. 
Probably other people are already doing this but this benefit had never 
really occurred to me until now. Also, I was having trouble with using 
speakup because my vmware machine's volume was much lower than my 
voiceover volume and I didn't want to turn down voiceover; I had heard 
there was a volume problem with vmware fusion but just to check I ran 
alsamixer and was able to raise the volume to a very good level without 
affecting the voiceover volume. so now I guess you could say I have 
speakup on the Mac!




-- 
Cheryl

May the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to You,
Lord, my rock and my Redeemer.
(Psalm 19:14, HCSB)