creating a speakup cli cd

[Don Raikes]

Hi folks,

Ok I have never been able to get this straight in my head.

Which release is squeeze and which is wheezy?

On the debian site I am only finding downloads for 6.06 which I had problems with trying to install.  My Braille display came up no problem, but I couldn't access the installer.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Baechler [mailto:tony at baechler.net] 
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 12:23 AM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: creating a speakup cli cd

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.
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