On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 09:01:42AM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote: > You haven't found documentation, because no one has written any. Perhaps > you'll fix that for the next person if you see this through. Hello everyone, I'd like to clarify that a bit, because the problem here is more serious than missing documentation. We haven't written any documentation about using Speakup with software speech because there is no clear way how to do that properly. That's also the reason why we didn't produce any distribution packages for speechd-up. I personally don't recommend speechd-up for serious work. I'm aware of many issues with it (slow response on typing keys, impossible to use with any other language than English, impossible to modify speech parameters from outside, punctuation and capital letter recognition modes not working properly, ...). I think the issues with slow responsibility are the worst ones. Not even it is annoying, but it leads many users to think software speech on today's computers is very slow and inferior to hardware synthesis. This is not true, that's a problem in the interface Speakup--Speech Dispatcher. I don't see any possible way to fix speechd-up under the current interface provided by Speakup in /dev/synth. If we would like to interface Speakup to software speech (using Speech Dispatcher or other methods) properly, that would require (some trivial and some non-trivial) modifications to Speakup. We tried to do them in Brailcom, but we didn't succeed. Partly because we didn't have any previous experience with kernel programming and partly because Speakup's code is quite complicated and not well documented (as well as the kernel code itself in this area). If there is will among the Speakup developers to try to solve this problem (I'm not speaking about any technical details right now), we really welcome it and we are ready to cooperate. But till then, or till somebody develops some other decent screen reader (I would especially welcome an effort to develop a user-space screen reader), I can't recommend using speechd-up unless there is no other choice. I'd especially like to bring the speechd-el and Emacspeak approach to your attention as a possible partial solution. You can find out more about speechd-el on http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd-el and about Emacspeak on http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net . I think this approach is much better in many cases. On the other side it can't substitute Speakup in providing speechd during boot/shutdown and when you run into problematic situations. With Regards, Hynek Hanke http://www.freebsoft.org/
