the direction of speakup

Wed May 8 13:58:16 EDT 2013

OK, then we need to fix serial support as well, so we do the
registration correctly, or find some other way to  do these things -- a
discussion is still needed and this is why I proposed a conference call,
but hardly anyone seems interested.

Mike Ray <mike at raspberryvi.org> wrote:

> 
> I think I might have addressed John when I should have said Robert.
> 
> I'm for keeping SpeakUp in the kernel.
> 
> However, without meaning any offense to anybody's hard work; something
> needs doing to get SpeakUp back on trap. Even if that is just a revamp
> of the web pages. Links are broken, the text is out of date.
> 
> In the source distro, the install script is broken.
> 
> I throw my hat in to the ring as a volunteer to help where I can.
> 
> Mike
> 
> On 08/05/2013 17:14, covici at ccs.covici.com wrote:
> > here here -- I use speakup all day long -- have never been able to gett
> > gnome reliably and I use that other operating system for web brousing
> > and stuff Linux will not do.
> >
> > John G. Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> I totally disagree. Speakup has little purpose except for the fact
> >> that it runs in kernel space. First of all, there are other screen
> >> readers for user space. And you really need a GUI these days. I
> >> suppose there are people using speakup all day every day. Mutt for
> >> email, lynx or edbrowse for the web. But I'm sure  the vast majority
> >> of linux users use orca for every day tasks.
> >>
> >> The most important feature for speakup is to bail you out when you are
> >> really in trouble because your server is down. I don't know what you
> >> do for a living but I do systems admin and I cannot live without
> >> speakup in kernel space. About the only thing that I can think of that
> >> is equivalent to simply plugging in a hardware synth and getting boot
> >> messages would be setting up something like a Raspberry Pie to boot
> >> into kermit and display serial console messages. But it wouldn't be
> >> the same because you'd need a keyboard for the RPI.   I don't know --
> >> when a server is down, the last thing I want to do is mess with all
> >> that stuff. I just want to plug in the hardware speech synth and press
> >> the print screen key.
> >>
> >> On 05/08/13 08:37, Robert Spangler wrote:
> >>> I throw my vote in for putting Speakup in userspace.  As others have
> >>> said, if we use software speech, we aren't hearing the earliest boot
> >>> messages anyways.  While there are still many folks using hardware
> >>> speech, it seems as though the software speech trend is expanding.  In
> >>> addition, there are other ways of checking boot messages.  It is a
> >>> little disheartening, however, because being able to hear messages from
> >>> the start of boot time has been a major advantage to Linux users but I
> >>> think that getting Speakup out of the kernel will benefit us all in the
> >>> long run.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks,
> >>> Robert Spangler, B.A. in Urban Studies and Spanish
> >>> spangler.robert at gmail.com
> >>>
> >>> On 5/2/2013 3:22 AM, covici at ccs.covici.com wrote:
> >>>> If we gave up the kernel, which I would really prefer not to do, then we
> >>>> could use speech dispatcher and write drivers for the serial synths or
> >>>> usb ones.  But this is to be decided.
> >>>>
> >>>> acollins at icsmail.net wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>> Hello all.  If Speakup were a user space app, you could start it from
> >>>>> inittab, like you can brltty.  It would also be able to access the video
> >>>>> scrollback buffer.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I don't think the support for isa synths needs to go away just yet.
> >>>>> Believe it or not, there are still a few folks running older machines
> >>>>> with
> >>>>> isa slots with isa synths in them.  Besides this, for those who really
> >>>>> want them, it is still possible to buy machines with isa slots, so if
> >>>>> you have an isa synth, you can use it in a new machine.  So I don't
> >>>>> think it's time to drop isa support yet.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Having said that, adding usable usb serial, and support for usb synths
> >>>>> should be a priority.  At this point, I find myself ambivalent about
> >>>>> whether speakup stays in the kernel or not.  You don't get any better
> >>>>> access to boot messages with software speech than you could from user
> >>>>> space.  If the user space Speakup could be started from inittab, then
> >>>>> you could still get info about file system checks and such.  The only
> >>>>> thing you couldn't get, which you can't get with software speech either,
> >>>>> is kernle panic errors.  With Speakup in the kernel, and using a
> >>>>> hardware synth, you can sometimes still get that info, depending on how
> >>>>> the kernel panics.  There have been a couple of times when this has been
> >>>>> a life saver for me, but it happens so rarely, that I could probably
> >>>>> live with the inconvenience.  Thus I'm finding myself ambivalent about
> >>>>> Speakup staying in the kernel.  But then I'm getting older, and
> >>>>> ambivalent about a lot of things.  (grin)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Gene Collins
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> hmmm, I wonder if we could just add a kernel driver as though we were
> >>>>>> writing one for a new serial card that way we would conform to what the
> >>>>>> kernel devs want?  From within that, maybe you could specify the way to
> >>>>>> get the device to use, or maybe have some simple user space program to
> >>>>>> tell it the device -- this is way off the top of my head, but is
> >>>>>> interesting to me.  You could write drivers for speech dispatcher for
> >>>>>> serial synths, but getting that into an initramfs would be difficult,
> >>>>>> you would have to change the generation scripts for each distribution,
> >>>>>> etc.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> my $.02 (or .2 trillion with hyperinflation).
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> William Hubbs <w.d.hubbs at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>> All,
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> let's start a new thread here to figure out what needs to be done with
> >>>>>>> speakup.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Here are my ideas and the issues I see with them:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> 1. What should we do with support for the internal ISA synthesizers?
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> My thought is that these can be dropped.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> 2. We basically have two choices for the serial synthesizer issues.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> a. If we keep this code inside the kernel, the bottom line is it needs
> >>>>>>> to be completely rewritten and there need to be changes made on the
> >>>>>>> kernel side to make it work correctly.
> >>>>>>> This will take time, and someone here will need to
> >>>>>>> work closely with the kernel  developers, and we'll need to find
> >>>>>>> someone
> >>>>>>> in the kernel community to guide us -- maybe not by writing the
> >>>>>>> code for
> >>>>>>> us, but at least consulting with us.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> b. If we move this code into user space, we can code it however we
> >>>>>>> want,
> >>>>>>> and that frees us from involving the kernel team.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> question:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> If we move the serial code to user space, I realize there is a concern
> >>>>>>> about missing early boot messages. Would putting the user space daemon
> >>>>>>> into an initramfs solve this?  would you be able to start it early
> >>>>>>> enough to get all of the boot messages if it was in an initramfs?
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> William
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>>>> Speakup mailing list
> >>>>>>> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >>>>>>> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >>>>>> --
> >>>>>> Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
> >>>>>> How do
> >>>>>> you spend it?
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>           John Covici
> >>>>>>           covici at ccs.covici.com
> >>>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>>> Speakup mailing list
> >>>>>> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >>>>>> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>> Speakup mailing list
> >>>>> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >>>>> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Speakup mailing list
> >>> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >>> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >>>
> >> -- 
> >> ---
> >> John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim at math.wisc.edu
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Speakup mailing list
> >> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> 
> -- 
> Michael A. Ray
> Analyst/Programmer
> Witley, Surrey, South-east UK
> 
> Interested in accessibility on the Raspberry Pi?
> Visit: http://www.raspberryvi.org/
> 
> From where you can join our mailing list for visually-impaired Pi hackers
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici at ccs.covici.com