speakup in user space (was Re: Serial conflict)

[Jason White]

Jacob Schmude  <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>I don't think that's a limitation of the VCSA devices themselves, but
>rather how they are used. These devices show the screen as it
>currently is at any given time, although documentation for them is
>rather sparse. But couldn't we, rather than querying the device,
>monitor it instead for incoming text? I'll do some digging and see
>what I can find out.

Even if the VCSA devices have such a limitation, you could propose changes to
overcome it, or write a relatively simple kernel module just to expose the
necessary information and implement the screen reader itself in user space.
>It just seems that to have speakup in the kernel even after removing
>serial support would leave us with all of the problems with none of
>the advantages remaining.

As I understand the situation, keystrokes can be intercepted from user space
as well now; support for this was integrated into BRLTTY relatively recently.

If I were designing a screen reader for Linux, I wouldn't put it in the kernel
unless there were really no workable alternative. If I had to touch the
kernel, it would be by way of a minimal driver just to provide the necessary
interfaces.