Speakup in Linux Open Source Summit

[Gregory Nowak]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 04:04:58PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> 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.

The ISA cards also provided an internal speech synthesizer. This was
versatile, since I recall the internal cards being more responsive
than the external serial synths were on older systems. This also meant
an internal card like the DoubleTalk PC could be used in situations
where an additional serial port would cause an IRQ conflict, since the
DoubleTalk PC only uses I/O addresses for communication. This could
also tie into the to-do section in speakup. 

> 
> 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

I would just say "with an active community."

> > 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.

Paired with a hardware synthesizer, I believe speakup is still the
only GNU/Linux screen reader available from boot up to
shutdown. Without that, I would personally not have learned how to compile the
linux kernel, since I wouldn't have had access to the kernel panics to
find out why the system didn't boot to a login prompt.

Greg


> 
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

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