As far as I can tell, there is no more solid screen reader in the world than speakup. For code that is supposedly such a mess, it sure works. There was that bug where it couldn't start talking to synths on the serial port. But I don't think that bug came as a result of some mistake. I think it was introduced during an attempt to make the kernel developers happy. So I wouldn't refute your assertion that speakup is way more solid than orca. But I certanly haven't had anywhere near as much trouble with orca as you have. I use it all day every day on everything from Dell servers to machines I built myself. I'm no orca expert either but maybe that's the trick. I have always just used the orca packages in debian. I probably haven't tried to build it from source for 5 or 6 years. So I'll admit that I can't say for sure that orca is stable enough to work as an alternative to speakup in user space. From my experience, that is certainly true. But I'll admit I might have a different opinion if we were a Red Hat On 05/08/13 11:45, Martin G. McCormick wrote: > This is a tough issue as I spend much of my day in the > command-line world and I do not disagree with your basic > statement about needing a GUI, these days even though it is more > of a ball and chain than a helpful tool. It's like a sore knee > or a backache. Nature usually fixes those in time, but the GUI > devours resources and there is always that one last problem that > keeps it from working right. > > I have both a Macintosh for the GUI and I use speakup > under Debian wheezy with lynx and nmh under FreeBSD for mail. > This last bit has nothing to do with screen readers but mh or > the package now known as nmh breaks the email process in to > small modules that allow one to automate different parts of the > mail process. Part of my job is building automation that sends > messages to others when various things happen so the use of nmh > is a choice. > > I have yet to get orca working on any system I use or > have access to. One such system is a Pentium4 running at 2.7 GHZ > and there is a gigabyte of RAM sitting there but there is > something in the BIOS that seems to know when I want to install > the latest ubuntu or Debian that might open up the world of > gnome and orca and the system figures out some clever way to > fail. > > By the way, speakup works beautifully on this system in > a command line console but The only time I ever heard orca talk > was on an obsolete version of ubuntu 9.0 which played for > sometimes an hour or so and sometimes a few seconds and then > would crash. > > You are correct in that basically, the speech process > needs to be separate from just about everything except the power > supply in order to hear the system start up from black. > > A Unix kernel is the master process and everything else > that happens on your system is spawned as a subprocess of the > master. Would it be possible to have a kernel equipped with > speakup spawn the rest of one's system as if it was a virtual > system? That could take care of the I/O. > > I used a hardware speech synthesizor for about 20 years > along with Kermit and DOS and a screen reader I wrote to > terminate and stay resident in MS-DOS so all my Unix boxes were > originally configured for a RS-232 console. That was back when > mother boards had RS-232 ports. > > You've really got to separate the speech or Braille > output from the rest or it will always bite you. > > Speakup should go in a sort of pre-kernel and that would > let you operate the real system in single-user mode, listen to > kernel messages and do all those things we should do if we are > to call ourselves Unix administrators. > > Martin > > "John G. Heim" writes: >> I totally disagree. Speakup has little purpose except for the fact that it >> runs in kernel space. First of all, there are other screen readers for >> user >> space. And you really need a GUI these days. I suppose there are people >> using speakup all day every day. Mutt for email, lynx or edbrowse for the >> web. >> But I'm sure the vast majority of linux users use orca for every day >> tasks. >> >> >> >> The most important feature for speakup is to bail you out when you are >> really in trouble because your server is down. I don't know what you do >> for >> a living but I do systems admin and I cannot live without speakup in >> kernel >> space. About the only thing that I can think of that is equivalent to >> simply plugging in a hardware synth and getting boot messages would be >> setting up something like a Raspberry Pie to boot into kermit and display >> serial console messages. But it wouldn't be the same because you'd need a >> keyboard for the RPI. I don't know -- when a server is down, the last >> thing >> I want to do is mess with all that stuff. I just want to plug in the >> hardware speech synth and press the print screen key. > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at linux-speakup.org > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup > -- --- John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim at math.wisc.edu
