Hi all. Since brltty is working well for me on this vmware fusion installation (it didn't a couple of years ago) I realized that I could ssh into my Mac with braille in the terminal which could eliminate the need to use the Mac terminal with brltty or voiceover; in fact, I don't actually even have to open terminal on the Mac. This led me to start thinking about a voiceoveron podbean podcast recently lamenting the limited usability of the Mac terminal with voiceover as compared to speakup on linux. Suddenly I realized the solution to that problem really is relatively simple. Of course you can ssh into a Mac using speakup for speech but what if you don't have both a linux machine and a Mac or what if you don't want to have to be running both machines all the time? You can set up a virtual machine on the mac (I used Arch), ssh into the mac, and do anything in the Mac terminal that you want to do with full use of speakup. I just did this as a trial to update my subversion install of brltty on my Mac. I'm using a full usb Apple keyboard that has a numeric keypad. Voiceover of course didn't talk during the svn procedure at all, at least not related to that activity. I was able to stop speech with the option key and use the numeric keypad to check the output. In short, it worked just as if I had somehow managed to install speakup on my mac for use in Terminal! Of course, if you have a vmware installation, you may not use Terminal on the Mac as much anyway but there still may be programs you want to compile or tasks you want to run on the Mac using terminal, plus you can have a vmware installation of linux plus the use of Macports and/or Fink along with the tools already present in the Mac's terminal by default and manage all of these with speakup and/or brltty. I should mention that if you are using a laptop keyboard or other keyboard without a numeric keypad, this may present challenges but it works perfectly with a full keyboard. Probably other people are already doing this but this benefit had never really occurred to me until now. Also, I was having trouble with using speakup because my vmware machine's volume was much lower than my voiceover volume and I didn't want to turn down voiceover; I had heard there was a volume problem with vmware fusion but just to check I ran alsamixer and was able to raise the volume to a very good level without affecting the voiceover volume. so now I guess you could say I have speakup on the Mac! -- Cheryl May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to You, Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm 19:14, HCSB)
