Jean-Philippe MENGUAL writes: > Oralux doesn't exist anymore, as the organization thinks that alternate > good solutions exist. I don't disagree at all. The challenge is finding one that doesn't render what one has as not usable. > The Debian installer includes speakup, which allows to work /ith a > hardware speech synthetiser. The support for software speech synthetiser > is in a non official CD on http://people.debian.org/~sthibault. The > current CD to install testing (wheezy) contains speakup with support for > software and hardware speech synthetiser. This feature is at this time > on the alternate CD above. That is great to know. I like hardware synthecisers because they can be made to talk if there is so much as a serial console available, but then you have to buy/connect them to whatever device you are trying to get going at the time. Software synthesis is my preference for fully-working systems as nothing else needs to be added to make them work. Thankfully, we are having this conversation rather than the ones we were having ten years ago which involved DOS/Windows systems and one of several strategies for terminal access in to the Unix box we really wanted to use. For literally about 19 years, I used a screen reader I wrote for myself in 8086 assembler to intercept the video interrupt where possible. I then used MSKermit for the VT10x emulation to serially talk to whatever Unix box I was using at the time. The Vinux2 installation that came out in 2009 gave me something that was extremely similar to the same functionality I had had with the EchoGP and DOS so I finally retired those old systems. For those of us who like to do a lot of tinkering and programming, a terminal console that only resets if you feed it way too much or when you strike a key is the way to go. Everything else ends up making me frustrated. I love the Macintosh and it's Alex voice is one of the best synthecisers I have heard, but they missed speech flow control by a country mile as the whole speech system resets every time new data come in. You can not tail a syslog or get good information from a compiler or anything else that gives bursty output. You must let it stammer for a while and then manually read the buffer which, to me is unacceptable. Speakup gets this aspect totally right in that if you don't touch the keyboard, you can hear output as it arrives until the buffer fills which, of course, is inevitable if new data are arriving quickly. Anyway, thanks for both of the replies I got on this list from Jean-Philippe MENGUAL and Larry Hart. The present Vinux distribution gives one a choice of speakup and several other alternatives, but it is based on ubuntu11.10 which has the serious sound problems that stop middle-aged P.C.'s so it is not an alternative right now. Martin McCormick
