Speakup in Linux Open Source Summit

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

Okash Khawaja, le ven. 29 mars 2019 11:04:35 +0000, a ecrit:
> 1. Title: I am thinking "Linux Speakup Architecture and Status" but it
> sounds mundane.

It could be

"Linux Speakup makes Linux talk to users: past and future"

> The major portion of the talk will be about architecture of speakup's
> kernel code, but see the abstract for clearer idea.


> Abstract:
> ---------
> 
> Linux Speakup started out as a kernel based screen reader. It has now
> grown to encompass a number of related projects. According to its
> website[1]: "The speakup project is basically a bunch of blind people
> who like messing around with Linux and writing cool and, hopefully
> useful, software."

It is not really so accurate nowadays. The Linux speakup community is
around the Speakup reader mostly.


> This talk will cover three aspects:
> 
> 1. History
> 2. Architecture
> 3. Current status and future
> 
> Speakup has been around for a while now. The first section will cover
> roots of the project and will take a look at its community.

It would be worth starting with mentioning that speakup was initially
written by a blind person (which is awesome!)

Then explain how it was at the time: people would either plug an
external device or even put an ISA card in their computer, which gives
them an additional serial port. That explains the initial way that
Speakup accessed serial ports by hand.

Then it'd be useful to explain that that approach became harder and
harder to maintain, and didn't allow USB, PCI serial ports etc. and then
you took the time to settle a proper tty discipline :)

The access to the console content and snooping the keyboard was also
initially not very neat, but over time I got to make Linux include
proper interfaces for them, so that Speakup now does things the proper
way.

> Benefits to Ecosystem:
> ----------------------
> 
> From technical standpoint, speakup is a very interesting project with a
> an active and helpful community. Maintainers and contributors are
> extremely patient and easy going. All this makes speakup a great way to
> learn about kernel development. Speakup has been around for quite a
> while which means, for the more adventurous developers, there are many
> opportunities to innovate.

I'd say you can add that it's useful for kernel developers to know how
accessibility typically needs to plug itself into the kernel, to get
screen reader shortcuts working, to peek the console content, and emit
data over a serial port.

Samuel