creating a speakup cli cd

[Tony Baechler]

John,

I put it to you, as both a former ACB member (I have to renew one of these 
days) and as a fellow blind person that what you say below is a good thing. 
  Specifically, you say that it's better to not have a customized live CD 
for the blind.  That's why I was very outspoken in my opposition to Vinux 
and generally don't recommend it to people.  You also said in your previous 
message that you would not create a live CD and you think GRML has all of 
the features and packages you would want and need.

First, I would really have to disagree that GRML only wants to use standard 
Debian tools.  They have created several scripts, including a special 
installer, grml2usb and other packages which work completely outside of 
Debian and were only relatively recently integrated into the Debian archive. 
  I ran into problems with their installer a long time ago when I first 
played with it.  Presumably this is fixed now, but by not using some form of 
D-I, there is no standard Speakup support within the installer.  Also, 
because of their reliance on a special set of scripts, I couldn't get X to 
work at all.  This was many years ago, so I'm sure any bugs are long since 
fixed, but the point is that I wouldn't reinvent the wheel when Debian 
already gives the source for D-I and their X packages.

Finally, to get to the point of all of this, the Debian Wheezy and Squeeze 
official live CDs do exactly what you say you like about GRML and work 
pretty much the same way in that you have to load the Speakup module and 
start espeakup by hand with the difference that the "espeak" and "espeakup" 
packages are not included by default.  If you look at the official Squeeze 
CD, it does have the Speakup kernel modules already and has the older 2.6.32 
kernel which still supports hardware speech.  I was successfully able to use 
it to rescue a system with a bad drive and it's now my choice for a rescue 
CD.  Since it is an official Debian CD, it only uses official Debian 
packages and is even less blind-friendly than GRML.  They aren't even 
including the software speech packages on the Wheezy CD.  However, by 
installing the live CD building packages, one can easily build a CD with the 
missing speech packages in a matter of minutes.  That's the project which I 
was talking about experimenting with in a couple of weeks.  It already 
includes a set of standard and rescue packages.  It's just a matter of 
including software speech and anything else that the blind might find 
useful.  I don't know about nowadays, but the official Debian CD seems to 
boot a lot faster than GRML did and comes already with the standard D-I 
which should support software speech.  I know the official D-I which ships 
with Wheezy supports it because I've tested it, but I'm not sure about a 
live CD.

You mentioned Oralux.  I didn't use it, but I remember it and know that it 
was popular for a while.  I would agree (see above) that a special CD for 
the blind is generally a bad idea.  However, I would rather push the Debian 
live CD maintainers to add the missing speech packages rather than rely on 
an unofficial CD which is based on Debian but is subject to change and 
doesn't really have the resources to keep up with accessibility problems. 
What I would like to see is the same boot option on the live CD as in D-I, 
specifically "s" and Enter to start software speech automatically.  To me, 
that seems much better in the long term while still not being blind-friendly 
and reasonably well supported.  You can even use the web to custom build a 
live CD, but I couldn't get it to work.

On 2/6/2013 8:19 AM, John G. Heim wrote:
> The change to having to do a "modprobe speakup_soft" and then "espeakup"
> happened in just the version before last (2011-11). So I don't think it is
> going to change again any time soon. The grml developers understandably want
> to stick as much as possible with standard debian tools. So they include the
> speakup modules and a few blind friendly packages like espeakup and brltty.
> But other than that, the disk is not customized for blind people. In a way
> that's a good thing because it means these accomodations (such as they are)
> are less likely to break and/or get left out of a release.