hello. I'm not familiar with the internals of the Speakup code specifically, but I think there's a lot of noise surrounding the issue of how to support serial synthesizers on machines without native serial ports. the question to be resolved, which I may try to do by doing a little reading, is how is it that Speakup talks to existing serial ports? Does it use its own serial driver, separate from the serial port drivers which exist elsewhere in the kernel, or does it call serial port drivers elsewhere in the kernel to get its work done. If the latter, then I shouldn't think it would be too hard to get Speakup to use any serial driver in the kernel. If that can be done, then Speakup should be able to use serial synthesizers whether they're attached to native serial ports, or serial ports hanging off USB buses. I've seen some notes that indicate to me that the problem may be as simple as figuring out what the name of the port to be used is in order to passit to Speakup at boot time. Perhaps, if that's the case, the problem is as simple as a documentation update. My point here is that at some level, a serial port should be generic enough that it doesn't matter to the user if it's attached to the main motherboard or if it's provided by a USB adaptor. In this case the user is Speakup, anD it should be calling the serial drivers in the kernel at a level above the physical layer in order that it not have to care about where the serial port lives. (In traditional Unix parlants, this layer is called the tty layer, and while mostly this layer is provided for user-level programs, kernel modules should be able to use it too.)
