the direction of speakup

[Kyle]

According to Jason White:
# It runs its own shell and captures input/output, somewhat like screen(1).

This actually makes YASR the most portable text console screen reader I
am aware of, since it can run on just about any Unix-like operating
system. It runs entirely in userspace and depends on shell output rather
than relying on any kernel level code or output. It also has the benefit
of being able to work with a wide range of hardware synthesizers via
Emacspeak servers and possibly other local drivers as well, and also has
software speech available through various interfaces, including EFlite
and speech-dispatcher. The trade-off is that you will get no speech
prior to login, although with the correct login script, you can have
YASR come up automatically once you've logged into the console you want
to use. There once was a separate program included in the YASR source
tree that could read the console prior to login, but I don't currently
know if it still works. I remember getting it to work at one point, but
that was some time ago. I did most things with a single text console
that ran YASR automatically at login and did all my work in Screen,
which allowed me to have a nearly unlimited number of "windows" open on
a single console, all under a single YASR instance.

Just a quick note: because of the way YASR works in a subshell, it
should be capable of working in a desktop terminal application like
Xterm, giving you familiar functionality when you have that text-based
application that Orca doesn't like in gnome-terminal. Keybindings
shouldn't be a problem either, even if you use gnome-terminal and
silence Orca, since as far as I know, there aren't any conflicts between
Orca and YASR keyboard commands.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"