Well, you have to keep some things in mind when discussing or thinking about changes to speakup for whatever reason: one is speakup is kernel code. Two is speakup is kernel code. 'grin' What I mean is the fewer things you can do in kernel code the better. On the other hand you have to maintain a way to communicate with speakup to control it's facilities such as synth rate, punctuation level and the like. We used to have a separate program with sent ioctl() calls to the kernel to control speakups facilities. Then the popular way of communicating with kernel space changed by Alan Cox and Linus. The /proc file system came along where you could either use a separate program to change settings indirectly through the /proc file system or directly by munnipulating the files under /proc. We rewrote speakup at that point to use the newly smiled upon method of communicating with the kernel. So saying all of the above I would not recommend changes to speakup to change it's settings directly because of the amount of time which would need to be spent in kernel space to accomplish those changes. Specifically I mean writing functions which would have to wait for user input of data such as rate changes because of the time involved. We do that now with the gotoxy functions and I've never been particularly happy about that. Fortunately it doesn't get used very often, so it isn't much of a problem and it will be needed for future speakup enhancements. Now, changes which would be useful and as you pointed out are already on the todo list is a mechanism to identify what program/application is running on this console and load a configuration change if one is available to modify speakup for this app. I don't really think it is a very big task to make this change but it is one I have not undertaken because of all the other modifications to speakup I need to make as well as all the other programming projects I've been working on lately. There are a number of other enhancements which really should be done as well such as determining background attributes and not speaking them when highlighting is changed. This would be very useful when working through a menu or program such as lynx. More work on cursor mode would also be a very nice thing to complete for those that fine automatic speaking of lines and characters a requirement to comfort level of using speakup. These are just two examples of additions which speakup sorely needs in some folks opinions. So I would incourage you or anyone else interested in making speakup better, to adopt as projects which will make a significant difference in it's usability. Looking back through this I'm not sure I actually answered your question. You did ask my opinion and you definitely got that. Anything you wish to do to help speakups development is appreciated. The more needed the enhancements the more appreciation will be accrued. Kirk -- Kirk Reiser The Computer Braille Facility e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca University of Western Ontario phone: (519) 661-3061
